


Koyomi Doppelganger

by East Tail Restoration (ybir)



Category: Bakemonogatari
Genre: Insurance Fraud, Multi, Selfcest, cw: nothing worse than what happens in the novels but absolutely not any better either tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-25 22:55:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 28,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19755433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ybir/pseuds/East%20Tail%20Restoration
Summary: Koyomi Araragi has an encounter with a mirror and now has to deal with his most consistent, irritating, and sexual-tension filled enemy yet: himself! Will his evil doppelganger manage to tear the Araragi harem apart? A short novella in the style of the palindromic Nisioisin's Monogatari novels.





	1. Tsukihi

Okay, I know this looks bad. I think any reasonable person could agree, if you walked down the street only to encounter a high school student yelling at an 8-year-old girl standing on his shoulders, while holding panties hanging off a clothesline, that person is obviously up to no good. This is the sort of scene that cements my place at the bottom of the character popularity rankings forever—no, this is the sort of scene where if it happened in an anime you were watching, and your roommate entered the room, you would find yourself explaining that it makes perfect sense in context, and that actually it’s not an anime for perverts, but a clever meta-commentary if only you understood the whole thing.

If you tried to say such a thing, it would surely hang over your entire friendship forever. You would be mocked mercilessly. Nobody would ever believe such weak protests.

Nevertheless, please hear me out.

Before you add “has conscripted a blonde child into helping him steal panties from his neighbours more efficiently” to my increasingly long callout post, please let me explain how it makes perfect sense in context.

I won’t say “it was my doppelganger.” Even though this is, in fact, a story about the time that I encountered another Koyomi Araragi—an imitation story about an imitation version of me—I won’t deny that the Araragi on that clothesline was me. It would be easy to blame my actions on him, to say “of course I was out of character, your honour, it’s just the fanfiction me!” However, I’m a man who takes responsibility for my actions.

And in this case, my responsibility is to tell you that it makes perfect sense in context.

I had just recently discovered that after several months of abusing my ability to transform into a vampire, the effect was starting to become permanent. It had come as a surprise to me, but really, I should have known. All actions have consequences, especially when it comes to abberations. If you keep revisiting the week you spent in hell every time you find yourself in trouble, you can’t be surprised when that becomes who you are.

If you keep flirting with the supernatural, you can’t be surprised when you end up getting married into the supernatural family.

In any event, at that point, it seemed like I had gotten off easy. This was before I found out the truth about Izuko Gaen, or Ougi Oshino, or any of that. At that point, I had some hunches about where my “final” story was leading, but all I knew for certain was that I was being punished for blithely using vampire powers to solve all my problems, and I had stopped just in the nick of time. The effects were irreversible, but so far, the only consequence was that I cast no reflection. No cravings for blood, no vulnerability to sunlight, no overpowered regenerative abilities; the only proof of my vampiricism was the most pathetic of qualities, the inability to see my own face in the mirror.

If my spring break transformation into a full vampire thrall was a week of hell, then this was an upper circle of limbo at worst. Although it did cause some problems.

For example.

This morning, I was awoken by my little sisters, as I was every morning. Or rather, I was awoken by Karen’s usual fists making impact with my body, while Tsukihi just lingered overhead, brandishing a pair of scissors.

“Good morni—Wait, whatever it was I did, I can explain! Please forgive me! Tsukihi, I know I’ve been a disgraceful brother and your revenge is well-deserved, but don’t throw your own life away by being arrested for murder!”

Most people wouldn’t be able to effortlessly switch to begging for their life first thing in the morning, but most people aren’t me. Not to brag, but I think I’m likely in the top percentile of begging for my life in all of Japan. You might even think that I spent an entire year genuflecting inside the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. 

The truth is, while I should have been studying for my college entrance exams, I spent most of my time visiting the Kita-Shirahebi Shrine and studying the art of begging for my life.

So while it seems incredible that I could start begging for my life for unknown reasons the instant I woke up, the fact is, it’s one of my greatest skills.

However, in this case, it seems my fears were misfounded.

“What? Oh. Don’t be weird, big brother. These are obviously for your hair.”

“Then you’re the one who should be begging for forgiveness. Dramatic hairstyle changes are your character trait, don’t drag me into them!”

Well, actually, it seems like most of the girls in my life changed their hair like most people change facial expressions. But not me. Mine had grown nearly all the way down my back since spring break, and while it was originally just to hide the bite marks on my neck, I’d come to like it that way.

_If you cut off my mane of Samson, who knows what it’ll do to my current power level?_

Wait, was that an appropriate comparison? Wasn’t it his scornful lover that cut off Samson’s hair? My sisters are often scornful, but we’re at least another twenty relationship points from being able to be called lovers. No, that’s not how it is at all. At this point, I should just admit to myself that I’m treating my favourability ratings like a golf score by making jokes like these.

We have a lot of fun around here with the siscon jokes, but it’s only because we all know that’s really just a thing that only happens in manga. As anyone who actually has siblings will tell you, the idea is so repulsive you would never want to even think about such a thing in real life. So when I joke about it, it’s like a linguist making a self-deprecating joke about having trouble spelling—it’s only funny because in your heart, you know it’s untrue. 

Truthfully, my love for my sisters is innocent and pure. 

Don’t laugh, that last thing wasn’t a joke!

Truthfully, I don’t find these sorts of jokes very funny myself—I’m not offended, they’re just not funny—but they’re an established part of the genre at this point, so I wouldn’t be a very good narrator if I didn’t deliver.

You know what they say, you can’t spell “consistent narrative voice” without “sis.”

“I don’t know what you’re mumbling about, but relax, I’m not going to cut all your hair. I’d have brought a handsaw and a garbage bag if I was doing that. Just let me deal with your bangs.”

“My bangs don’t need to be dealt with either! I can see just fine through them.”

I’m not usually one to think very hard about my personal image, so maybe I’m not used to defending my aesthetic decisions, but I could hardly show my face in public if I bowed to Tsukihi’s whimsical style of stylistic decision-making.

“Haven’t you looked at yourself in a mirror, big brother? Your bangs look like they were singed by the percussive force of a powerful special attack. At least let me trim off the burned parts.”

“Should I hold him down?” Karen asked, living up to her role as the muscle of the duo.

I didn’t think I spent that much time looking at my hair in the mirror under normal circumstances, but I guess you don’t realize how important some things are until they’re gone. Either way, I never would have imagined this would be the biggest inconvenience of my reflection disappearing.

“I’m sure it’s fine!”

“It’s absolutely _not_ fine. Maybe you don’t mind, but think about the shame it’ll bring on your family.”

“Karen, help me out. You think I look fine, don’t you?”

Karen looked confused and torn, like a puppy that’s been told “come here!” by two different people it wants to impress, but neither knows which of the two to answer nor what the command itself even means.

“Leave Karen out of this. Koyomi, big brother, think about what people are going to say. Everyone will say ‘do you think that scary-looking Araragi son looks like that because he got singed by the Fire Sisters?’”

Is that really something a normal human would say?!

“‘Oh, poor thing… he must have gotten caught between the character for fire in Tsukihi’s name and the character for fire in Karen’s name and gotten burned. Those sisters can be so cruel!’”

“Wait, you say it would bring shame to the family, but don’t you just mean it would bring shame to you? Since when is that an emotion you’re capable of feeling?”

_Not to mention, I don’t think anyone outside of this family is nearly that impressed by tenuous wordplay. Believe me, I’d know, I’m constantly inflicting it on everyone else._

“Big brother, you’re constantly teaching us new meanings of the word shame every day.”

“Yeah, like the other day, when I was going to take a bath and found you two—” Karen started, but got cut off by Tsukihi.

“What did I say? Unified front, Karen!”

“Sorry… I thought that was helping.”

“Come on, just a quick trim of the burned ends. It’ll be quick and easy, and that way nobody will spread any rumours about us being violent.”

Uh, I think it’s too late for that. Also, are they really rumours if they’re documented, cited, and considered established fact by every guidebook and wiki?

However, she did have a point that maybe I was protesting too much.

If the whole point was that I don’t want to think too much about my own personal image, then arguing at length with her about it seemed like it was only having the opposite effect, and the truly characteristically easygoing approach would be to just let her do a quick trim and move on, so we didn’t have to fight about it.

“In that case, I’ll—”

I started to concede, but it was too late. The scene had already developed a certain energy. The train was moving too fast to change rails now. In other words, Tsukihi hadn’t even considered the possibility that her words would reach me, and assumed they hadn’t.

“Hold him down, Karen!”

I’d never imagined my first time being pinned down against a bed would be with my little sister (joke)!

I’m going to gloss over what happened next, because it was too unpleasant and real to even make a joke about, but suffice to say in the chaos that ensued, the quick trim did not go as planned and it ended up in noticeable damage to my bangs as well as a horrifying amount of blood (which I think probably would have been even worse if not for my vague but still active vampiric healing abilities). I didn’t think it would leave a scar, but certainly I would have a visible cut on the left side of my forehead for a few days, at the very least.

Yet another thing that I couldn’t be certain of without a mirror.

In the bloody carnage, even though I was the victim of this early morning attack, I ended up having to console my little sisters and convince them to stop crying. Actually, it was only Karen who was crying. Tsukihi seemed to be showing absolutely no remorse at her actions.

Truly she was my little sister.


	2. Panties

After all that, I didn’t feel like seeing either of their faces or even sharing a roof with them, so after getting Karen to clean up the blood from my forehead—I’d do it myself, but, well, mirrors—I decided to leave the house. I didn’t have a goal in mind, and since school was out and I had no plans for the day other than studying for entrance exams later, I found myself walking aimlessly.

Not even riding my bicycle, since at this point, I’d had _two_ destroyed. I felt depressed just thinking about that, even though, now that I think about it, the circumstances of the last one’s destruction had just been played off as a joke.

Would the circumstances of my face being destroyed also be played off as a joke? I can’t laugh at that!

I needed an impartial opinion.

I needed to know from someone who would tell me the truth.

Or at the very least, I needed to know from someone who wouldn’t respond with “ha ha, uh, yeah, it’s fine, don’t even worry about it, big brother!”

Don’t they know that “don’t worry about it” is the most worrying sentence in the entire English language?!

Therefore, I needed an impartial opinion.

I needed an opinion from an immortal beautiful vampire who travelled to Japan in order to die but instead ended up being fate-bound to me in the pathetic form of a sassy blonde 8-year-old girl (long story).

“Shinobu, wake up.”

“Shinobu, wake up.”

“Shinobu, I promise you’ll win a single donut of 300 yen value or less to be delivered at an unspecified point in the future (with answer of a skill-testing question) so please wake up.”

That last one seemed to do the trick. She emerged from my shadow like a shut-in emerges from his darkened room after an all-night MMORPG raid session in search of caffeine.

“I was not slumbering. I was merely wallowing in misery in the exact same manner thou art. Dost thou forget thy outsized influence on my emotional state?”

Truthfully, her petulence put a smile on my face.

I might be in a bad mood, but I’ve never been in a mood so bad that it couldn’t be immediately improved by listening to a four foot tall blonde give me a dressing down using archaic pronouns. It’s just inherently cute.

It’s very convenient for me that Shinobu feeling bad is so uplifting.

Like the opposite of a vicious circle.

Wait, wasn’t the point of this whole story for me to provide context proving that I’m not as bad a person as I might seem?

Really, I just wanted confirmation from the girl I was about to recruit as my walking, talking mirror.

“Shinobu, I’m recruiting you to be my walking, talking mirror.”

“Thou needeth not repeat thyself. I am perfectly capable of reading the narration, thou surely knoweth.”

Oh, is that how the psychic connection works.

“Of course it is. Thou art worried about your face being marred, correct? Well, turn to face me, so I can see for myself. Or dost thou simply expect me to say ‘don’t worry, I’m sure you look totally normal, teheh~!’ sight unseen?”

“Did they even have tildes back when you learned our language? Surely that’s a modern technology!”

“I pray thee to worry naught of it.”

Now she was just doing it on purpose.

“Shinobu, please.”

“Very well.”

She looked me up and down, appraising my entire situation.

Wait, but I only asked her to appraise my face. Don’t unnecessarily give me a once-over!

“I will not lie and say that thou appearest perfectly normal. But worry not. The damage to both thy visage and locks is superficial at worst. Every she who gazeth upon thee for superficial reasons will continue to be pleased to do so, and in short time the affliction will end.”

Speaking of unnecessary things.

“Please rephrase that more straightforwardly! And highlight the subject, object, and verb using different colours of markers so I can understand it.”

“Thy girlfriend will still think thou art hot.”

That’s a little too straightforward!

“‘Thy girlfriend’ is the subject, ‘will’ is the verb, and thou art the object.”

I can’t believe I’ve been objectified like this! Well, there’s a first time for everything.

“Kakaka, surely thou don’t believe that. Dost thou really have so little understanding of how lustily others gaze upon thee?”

“I guess I’ve never thought about it much.”

“Surely thou must realize how conspicuous it is to go 14 volumes without once making even a single passing remark about thy physical attractiveness. ’Tis an absence so dramatic that it calls more attention to itself than were it simply present. Only an act of willful obliviousness could obscure it from you.”

She says of the man who can’t even see his own face in a mirror anymore.

“Thou saweth the anime adaptation, did thou not? I was disappointed to see that they made thee hot.”

“Wait, make up your mind. I thought you were saying it’s true that I was!”

_It’s true, but it doesn’t mean they should acknowledge it._

I didn’t know what she meant by that, at the time.

A truth that shouldn’t be acknowledged?

What could that mean?

Was there some sort of philosophical concept I didn’t understand?

Was it something to do with the nature of truth?

“Explai—” I started to say, but before I could even finish, I was suddenly interrupted.

I had found myself escaping the terror of my sisters only to end up arguing with a tiny vampire in the middle of the street.

I had found myself injured and insulted.

I had found myself interrupted before I could find any clarity.

I had found myself with a pair of bright white women’s panties blown by the wind right into my face.

“—nn.”

Since they were already on my face, I deeply inhaled. Using my keenly honed special vampiric senses, I was able to immediately ascertain the full story. The underwear had been freshly laundered in hot water, using extra detergent to get the sweat out.

I took another sniff. It all made sense now. The underwear had been placed on the clothesline in the back yard I was standing next to by the owner’s daughter, conveniently home from school during the break, but unpracticed in hanging laundry. She hadn’t attached the clothespins correctly, and it had blown off in the wind because of her negligence.

I learned nothing from my third sniff, and so I removed them from my face.

That is to say, I held them in my hands.

While it wouldn’t be the first time I stood out in the open with someone else’s undergarments in my hands, those occurences didn’t go very well either, so I was certain I needed to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

Still, just abandoning them seemed irresponsible. Surely nobody would say that the right thing to do in this situation would be to just discard someone’s panties into the wind forever.

Even if that’s what would have happened if I wasn’t present, I was present, so it seemed wrong.

I approached the wall and tried to quickly replace them on the clotheline before anyone noticed me, but even standing on my tiptoes, I wasn’t able to reach.

“Shinobu, help me up.”

“No.”

“Come on, Shinobu, let me stand on your shoulders so I’m tall enough to reach, before someone spots us.”

“I may be thy servant, but I am not thy stepstool.”

“If you’re saying that you want me to be your stepstool, then fine, I’ll accept. Quickly, hop on before you change your mind.”

I don’t think I actually managed to fool her with my clever verbal trick, but she climbed up onto my shoulders anyway, perhaps because she had grown annoyed with how long this scene had gone on for and knew humouring me was the only way to end it.

“Be careful! Come on, you’ve almost got it!”

“Surely this isn’t worth the effort. Especially not now that thy have stained these garments with the blood from thy injured face.”

“That’s not my blood! They’re just… extra-patriotic panties, fashioned after the flag of Japan.”

“Then why do they smell so delicious?”

“Just hurry up!”

Even still, with the extra height, she struggled to reach the orphaned clothespins on the laundry line, and only managed to get one barely attached.

As you can see now, my actions make perfect sense in context.

I’m innocent of all wrongdoing, your honour.

In fact, you ought to be ashamed of me for assuming the worst when in fact, this presumed panty-loving youth-corrupting pervert is actually a true hero of justice, doing the right thing even when no one was looking. Especially when no one was looking!

Rescind your callout post immediately and reflect upon your hasty conclusions.

Demand an apology from your roommate for accusing you of being a pervert simply for watching a tale of a man doing the right thing even if society looks down upon him!

Well, actually.

I say that no one was looking, but that turned out to not be true.

“Mr. Araragi!” a girl’s voice called out from a few metres away.

Shinobu immediately fell off my shoulders, tumbling ass-backwards into my shadow in order to stay hidden, so I hoped that the girl who had seen me hadn’t noticed the abberation’s presence.

At worst, she would hopefully assume it was a trick of the light.

However, with Shinobu gone from the scene, they still hadn’t been fastened securely, and so all I could do was watch as the panties flew off once more, disappearing on the wind forever like a proudly sailing flag.

Only once they had vanished did my attention turn to the girl who had sabotaged my best effort at valiant heroism.

No, not the girl. The three girls. The three girls still dressed in their middle school uniforms.

“Mr. Araragi, we’ve finally found you!”

I recognized them instantly.

The Occult Research Club.

Oh, fuck off.


	3. Occult Research Club

I realize it’s asking a lot to accept the idea that I have a history with no less than three different all new original characters (do not steal), but the truth is that we’ve actually encountered each other on multiple occassions and there just wasn’t any need to bring it up before.

The reason why I’ve never mentioned the Occult Research Club in any previous volume is the same reason why I’ve never talked about tripping over my own shoelaces, or putting 100 yen into a vending machine only to have it fail to dispense anything.

They’re annoying, but not in a way that’s even worth mentioning.

Any story that revolves around them is the kind that ends with “…eh, but it wasn’t really that big a deal, I actually don’t know why I told you about this in the first place.”

So in this case, when they walked in on my easily-confusable panty mishap, I didn’t really strictly need to play it cool. Nothing these three middle schoolers could do or say would possibly have any negative consequences for me. However, I did play it cool anyway, perhaps because my conversation with Shinobu had left me feeling conscious of my image.

Although little did I know what it really meant to be conscious of your image, at that point.

I played it cool nevertheless.

“Ahhhh uhhhhh what a lovely day it is to do some stretches, huh! Without PE classes happening this week, it’s really on us to make sure we stay in shape! Just doing some normal excercise! I think it’s especially beautiful the way the sun shines off my jacket in a way that’s reminiscent of a small pale blonde even though there’s obviously not one there!”

Perfect.

Nailed it.

“That describes no known phenomenon of the sun. You are attempting to obviate our understanding of the current situation we find ourselves in by inventing false scenarios unnecessarily,” said number 1.

“It’s okay, Mr. Araragi! You don’t have to explain. Friends don’t have to explain anything to each other. We’re just here to give you something!” said number 3.

We’re not friends.

We are absolutely not friends.

For one thing, lately, all my friends seem to get dragged into what’s been very unfortunately been termed my “harem,” which would be right out of the question for these three. They can’t even handle “I’m too cool to talk to you”-Araragi, let alone the real me.

For another thing, it should be obvious that we’re not friends when I don’t even know their names.

Deliberately.

If you told them to me, I would do multiplication tables in my head until it overwrote the part of my short term memory that was used to store that knowledge.

They say you can be on “a first name basis” to mean you know someone pretty well outside of a professional context, which implies the existence of a “last name basis” as well. Well, we’re on a “no name basis.”

I just think of them as numbers 1, 2, and 3.

Number 1 has a ponytail, so she’s number 1.

Number 2 has twintails, so she’s number 2.

Number 3 doesn’t have some kind of new hairstyle only existing in popular anime from this season that somehow involves the hair split into three parts, although that’s a reasonable assumption to make. She didn’t give me anything so easy to work with. No, she’s number 3 because she always greets me as “Mr. Araragi,” and “Mister” and the number three are homophones in Japanese.

It’s a questionable and unrigorous naming scheme, so it’s perfect for a questionable and unrigorous group of characters like them. A group of characters who seem like they must have wandered in from some tedious series for herbivores about “cute girls doing cute things” that’s just about them uselessly sitting around and somehow manages to go 12 episodes without even accidentally having a single plot point to speak of.

No, that’s not a specific reference to something, it’s just a feeling I get.

Certainly at no point has the Occult Research Club actually done any occult research.

I know this, because the first time I met them, number 3 told me “Please let us know if you encounter anything strange in this town, Mr. Araragi! It would be so fun to think there’s supernatural stuff going on even in a quiet town like ours, don’t you think? So let us in on it!”

First off, it’s not fun.

I’ve had many encounters with strange things, or rather known many people who have had encounters with strange things, and there was nothing fun about any of them.

There’s nothing fun about encountering a vampire.

…or a crab.

…or a devil.

…or a snail.

…or a snake.

…or a cat.

…or a bee.

…or a cuckoo.

…or even a mirror, which I was about to find myself in front of.

True, there’s some fun things that came out of those, but that speaks more to the human ability to bond and sympathize over challenges than any notion of dealing with their burden being fun.

Just because you can laugh at your trauma doesn’t mean you should look for trauma so you’ll have things to laugh at.

Second off, though.

The least understandable part of all.

Just how stupid do you have to be in order to not realize there’s a lot of supernatural stuff going on in this town?! There were three vampire hunter fights that forced our school to spend billions of yen remodelling the school yard! Middle schoolers are constantly buying and placing curses they bought from a swindler on each other!! It was nearly the site of the next Great Yokai War!!! A tiger burned down no less than two buildings!!! A vengeful god took up residence in a temple and overran it with snakes for months!!!!

Come on!!!!!

How can you not notice even a single one of these things? This isn’t a quiet town at all! You have to be willfully invested in the status quo to look away from these kinds of things.

I understand how all the adults here are too busy to let themselves see the obvious, but it would fall apart under even a single moment of occult research, if they had done any.

So obviously they hadn’t.

What a bunch of fakes.

No, they’re not even fakes. Fake is the word I like to use for my sisters, who are known as the team who fights for justice, the Fire Sisters, but are actually just a couple of troublemakers.

Fake implies pretending to be one thing when you’re actually another.

Like printing the famous Louis Vuitton trademarked pattern on the outside of a cheap knockoff bag, or a well-known writer making fanfic under a pseudonym.

I’m certainly not judging anyone who would buy a knockoff bag. Given the aforementioned circumstances, I’m no great defender of corporate IP. However, the problem with buying such a bag is that it appears to be high quality, but in fact, it’s probably so cheap that the bottom might fall through.

Fakeness can backfire when people see through it.

The Occult Research Club isn’t a fake Louis Vuitton bag, though. They’re more like that backpack that has a picture of an off-model Sonic the Hedgehog standing next to letters spelling out the name “OBAMA,” with “Harry Potter” at the top for good measure. A fake is something you can get fooled by.

If you bought that backpack, you’d be more surprised if the bottom _didn’t_ fall through it.

Just because something is obvious about how bad it is doesn’t mean it’s worthy of respect, though, which is why I have zero respect for the Occult Research Club.

These were the sorts of things I was thinking about when number 2 held out a piece of paper to me.

“…a date… please…?”

_What?_

“What she means is, we recently purchased tickets to an art exhibition that had the priced reduced in such a fashion that it was economically advantageous to get four despite only having a requirement for three, and as such, we wish to extend our surplus ticket to you as a token gesture indicating friendship,” said number 1.

“We thought you might enjoy it! So won’t you come join us?” said number 3.

“I see. Thanks, I guess. I’ll think about it.”

I said, noncommittally.

I refused to commit to either acceptance or refusal.

“…but… it’s… the time is…”

“Please understand, Araragi: the mechanism by which this gallery operates is that tickets are purchased for a highly granular temporal window in order to ensure orderly flow of traffic and cannot be utilized outside of said period.”

“What she means is, sorry, but it’s gotta be now. Actually, we’d have to go right away, because we spent a lot of time looking for you.”

“I see.”

Another noncommittal expression from me.

Well, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to accept, actually. It’s not as if I had anything better to do today.

True, the only thing I know about art is from anime artbooks, but if everyone else in my life is expanding their horizons, maybe I should too.

Or maybe just lately, due to various circumstances, I’ve been missing the presence of middle schoolers in my life and am now feeling a craving.

Wait, reverse the order of those two statements so I don’t look bad!

Actually, I guess it looks bad no matter which order they’re in.

Besides, despite what the slightly-yandere-vibes girl said, there’s no way that a high school student hanging out with three middle schoolers could possibly be interpreted as a date by even the most uncharitable observer. But it is the sort of interesting and chaste date that’s popular with girls these days, isn’t it? Maybe if I leveled up my art appreciation skill, I’d be able to impress Hitagi by taking her on a date like that.

Just don’t say the phrase “practice date,” and it’ll be fine.

“Fine, sounds fun. I’ll go on a practice date with you.”

Why did I even jinx myself like that?!

Fortunately, or actually probably unfortunately, they didn’t seem bothered by my phrasing one bit.

“I’m so glad, Mr. Araragi!”

“An agreeable proposition that we gladly accept, Araragi.”

“…yay…”

And that’s how I found myself getting dragged to an art gallery by a group of middle schoolers.


	4. The mirror

Well, when I say gallery—and I only realized this when I arrived—what I really mean is a storefront that had been rented out to an artist.

It didn’t really seem like the sort of thing that would require timed tickets.

Or even, really, any kind of ticket.

It really just looked more like a single room exhibit hidden behind a curtain, with the woman who was apparently the artist sitting at a cash register in front.

This is probably mean of me, but my initial impression was that she reminded me of a certain someone I wanted to never see again.

Deshuu Kaiki.

The con artist.

A swindler who had taken advantage of my girlfriend, hurt my little sister, and even stolen Shinobu’s donut money.

A thoroughly despicable human being.

I don’t mean to suggest it was him in a disguise, or something like that. Obviously she wasn’t. There wasn’t even that much of a physical resemblance, really, it was just a vibe I got from her. Maybe that wasn’t fair. Her personal style certainly seemed to match what you would expect from an artist running a gallery show, with large circular glasses and a long patchwork skirt that screamed “a true bohemian” at you.

Although in terms of physical resemblance, her hair was about as greasy as his.

Anyway, despite the ominous aura she projected, she was polite enough to each of us, and after a short warning to not take any pictures, she lead me and the three members of the Occult Research Club behind the curtain.

In front of us was an easel with a long written explanation on it, and the back of what must have been the exhibit itself. The idea seemed to be that you were to first read the artist’s statement, then walk around behind it to actually see the art once you were finished. Well, so first I tried to read the statement.

I couldn’t tell you what it said.

I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

I couldn’t make tails or heads of it.

It’s not that I didn’t understand the words, but I couldn’t figure out what it actually meant.

If the purpose of this visit was to level up my art appreciation skills, I was starting to worry that we were heading towards a full party wipe instead.

I felt like I was on the same level of intellectual rigour as the Occult Research Club, who were staring blankly at the easel with the same noncomprehension on their faces that I surely had.

Well, forget about that. You can’t have someone tell you how to feel about art, you have to experience it for yourself, right?

So I walked around to see what it actually was.

Personally, when I think “art,” I think of paintings or drawings or perhaps even sculptures, but what stood before me instead was a tall computer monitor, next to an ordinary mirror.

Looking at the computer monitor, I saw my own image, filtered by the computer to soften my features, make my eyes bigger, and a number of other beauty features that I suppose are associated with selfies these days.

Looking at the mirror, of course, I saw nothing but my empty jacket floating in front of the back wall.

Seeing these two things juxtaposed together, I think I understood what the artist was trying to convey, although I can’t really say I cared. It didn’t really seem like a very interesting point to make. At the risk of declaring political opposition to the idea of comparing and contrasting, it didn’t really seem like it was particularly meaningful to put two different things next to each other as if to say “these two things are different, and that’s bad.”

But maybe I would have had a stronger emotional reaction to it if I understood art better.

I think definitely I would have had a stronger emotional reaction to it if I was a member of the Occult Research Club, having followed me around the corner too quickly for me to react, seeing her own image reflected in the mirror but mine nowhere to be seen.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!” screamed number 3.

I tried to think of an appropriate way to recover from this situation.

While I was thinking, number 1 came around the corner to see why her friend was screaming.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!” screamed number 1.

I wasn’t sure what I could say to talk my way out of this one.

Instead of checking in on her friends, evidently number 2 was more scared by the sudden screams than curious, and ran outside the curtain to get away.

Okay, decisive action time.

There’s only one way I can make this seem normal.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” I joined in on the screaming.

After spending a good minute or so screaming and grabbing each other in fear and jumping up and down, we collectively decided the best thing to do would be to join number 2 outside the gallery. The artist paid us no mind as we hurried past her, I suppose, content that she had already gotten her money and uninterested in involving herself in the drama of screaming children.

Number 3 looked at me, and whispered, as if she was worried about being overheard:

“Mr. Araragi, you didn’t have a reflection!”

“Hmm… yeah… it looked that way, didn’t it.” I said, reverting to my original approach to them, which was noncommittal.

It hadn’t helped me before, but maybe it would help now?

No, probably not.

“What could the nature of this phenomenon possibly be? Surely the only possible explanation must involve… occult forces?!” number 1 said dramatically.

The way I saw things, I had three possible options to prevent this from blowing up into further drama and attention on me that I really neither wanted nor needed. I didn’t like any of them, though.

Option 1: tell them the truth, that I had encountered a vampire abberation, and through my own foolishness, was suffering additional side effects.

Option 2: deny that they saw anything unusual at all, blame it on the darkness of the room, or something.

Option 3: threaten them into silence.

I didn’t like any of these options. I think all of them would ultimately end up backfiring and causing me to get more attention, if nothing else, from the Occult Research Club telling others what I said.

But number 3’s scared whispers gave me an idea.

What if I could just get them to stay away?

“Do you think it’s cursed? You’re the Occult Research Club… tell me, in your expert opinion, do you think it’s safe to come near a mirror that can steal peoples’ reflections?”

“…s-surely not!” said number 2, although she hadn’t even seen anything.

“Yeah… I think you’re right. We should all stay away from it,” said number 3.

“Indeed…” said number 1.

I planted the idea in their head. I’m not proud, but to be fair, it was very easy. As far as kids go, I think these ones are pretty stupid.

No, actually, I’m the stupid one. I should have foreseen the consequences of saying something like that.

While it was effective in getting the Occult Research Club to leave me alone, to go forth and spread no rumours about me personally, to exit this story and never return, it was effective in something else too.

It was effective in proving how stupid I am.

Surely I should have known better than to lie about an abberation.


	5. Hanekawa

A few hours of avoiding any further human contact later, I met up with Hanekawa for our previous scheduled study date at the library. To be honest, I was surprised she was still helping me out with this, since last week when we made the plans she had said she was only in town briefly before continuing her globe-trotting adventure in search of Meme Oshino, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Actually, I think it might have been more for her benefit than mine, a bit of familiarity during a visit home that was otherwise uncannily different for her.

It’s funny to think that an encounter with me could possibly be grounding for anyone, but it’s a service I’ll happily provide.

Plus if I’m really going to get into college with Hitagi, I still could use all the help I could get.

It seemed like Hanekawa could use help, too, seeing how nervous she was when she greeted me.

Even after we put our books out on the table, she just kept her arms crossed in front of her, looking uncomfortable.

“Um… I was thinking about what you said earlier.”

“Yeah?”

I wasn’t really sure what she was referring to.

“…it’s tempting, it really is, but… I don’t think I can do it, Araragi.”

“Yeah…?”

I was certain I didn’t know what she was referring to, in fact.

“I still like you a lot, of course…”

“Y-yeah?!”

“…but I think we both know that it wouldn’t be respectful to your relationship with Hitagi, and that’s very important to me, too.”

I was starting to feel as nervous as she looked.

I couldn’t piece together what she was talking about through context, no matter how hard I tried.

What was she talking about?

…I’m glad she still likes me, but.

Really, the fact that she’s spent so much time with me over the past year, hanging out with me nearly every other day to help me study, was already proof of that. If it wasn’t obvious to me at the time, it was certainly obvious when she left.

She started off as a person I owed my life to, but soon became a very dear friend.

But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what she was talking about.

I had to just say it.

“…Hanekawa. I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”

She glanced away, but before she did, there was a look in her eyes as if I’d said something unimaginably cruel. She wasn’t crying, but… the brief glance I got made it seem as though she was about to start at any moment. Like she was trying her best to make sure I didn’t see the tears she wanted to shed.

As she shifted, her breasts bounced a little more than usual, and I felty guilty for noticing. But looking her in the eyes felt like it was even worse, so what else was I supposed to do?

“…you’re not going to make me say it, are you?”

“Sorry, but yes?”

She took a deep breath, steeling herself.

As if she wasn’t just providing some simple matter of context, but delivering an important dramatic statement with huge interpersonal consequences.

_I won’t be your side piece, Araragi._

“WHAT.”

“SORRY?”

I didn’t know how to respond to that.

“I MEAN, GOOD?”

Where did she even learn that phrase?! Did she pick it up during her adventures abroad? If so, I’m very worried about the sorts of people my dear platonic friend Hanekawa is meeting while travelling!

“OBVIOUSLY?”

“Please don’t be mad.”

“I’M NOT MAD. I’M HAPPY YOU DON’T WANT THAT. GOOD.”

And then I added, barely louder than a whisper, since we were after all still in a library:

“I’m very sorry if I said something to suggest that. I don’t know what you’re referring to, but you must have misunderstood whatever it was I said, because I promise I didn’t mean it like that. I’d never think of you as… as… that phrase you said. I’m sorry if I suggested otherwise!”

She gave me a confused look.

“But that’s the exact phrase you used: side piece.”

“Please stop saying it!”

She was clearly upset and I wanted to comfort her.

But I was certain I had never said such a thing.

I’d never even thought such a thing.

Well, maybe there was a time when I thought such a thing. But not now.

Someone like Kanbaru or Shinobu can roll with the “harem” jokes and have fun, but for Hanekawa, who had worked up the courage to move on after I saved her life from a tiger, I only wanted to treat her with seriousness.

However, it didn’t seem like I could comfort her by taking responsibility for something I’d never said. I'd gladly take such an easy solution if it would work, but.

With Hanekawa, I knew I had to be honest with her to help her.

“…when did I say that?” I finally asked.

“Earlier today!”

_But that’s impossible._

It’s definitely not the case.

I didn’t think she was lying, but I hadn’t even talked to anyone in the last five hours, let alone her.

If she thought she had spoken to me earlier, she hadn’t.

“…I know this is going to sound unreliable, but you have to believe me: this is the first time we’ve spoken all day. I swear on my life, Hanekawa.”

“But…”

I tried to think of possible explanations that could mean we were both correct.

“Was it by text? Do you think someone could have hacked my phone…? If someone tried to pretend to be me to hurt you, I’ll never forgive them!”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“By phone? Did someone imitate my voice?!”

“…it was in person, Araragi.”

Explanations failed me.

But I know whoever she met, it wasn’t me.

“When was it? The only people I’ve talked to today were my sisters this morning, then those middle schoolers at the weird mirror art exhibit… then I spent the afternoon at the mall until now.”

“Precisely 74 minutes ago.”

She shifted uncomfortably to check her phone for the time, her arms still crossed, and I promise.

I promise that I felt bad for noticing the slight bounce of her breasts, given the circumstances.

I tried to focus.

“I’m sure I was at the mall then. Shinobu will vouch for me, right?”

From the depths of my shadow, a small voice grumbled:

“I shan’t… do any such thing. …I am slumbering.”

“Please, still, you have to believe me. I think… my phone has a GPS in it, right? I’m sure there’s got to be a way to prove it…”

“You don’t need to do that. Of course I believe you. You’d never lie to me.”

What a relief.

I don’t know what I would have done if she thought that I had hurt her and was trying to avoid taking responsibility for it.

What an incredible trust she had in me, after such an unbelievable story.

I mean, we’d been through so much together.

Still, I had to somehow live up to that faith she had in me.

“But… then, who did I talk to, if it wasn’t you?”

“What did he look like?”

“Just like you! Except… hm. Now that you mention it…”

She paused, thoughtfully, as if she wasn’t certain of something. As if something seemed just slightly off to her, but she couldn’t quite place it.

“…he sounded more like the you that I met in that PE shed than the you that I know now. Talking about how perhaps there was something else I could help you practice instead. I think the implication was… well… that is, um, it definitely had strong sexual overtones.”

“If I find him, I’ll never forgive him!”

Even I’m not allowed to act like me! Someone else doing it is absolutely unforgivable!

“No, actually, that’s not the part that’s bothering me. Wait, did you say mirror? Araragi, do you think it could be some kind of abberation?”

“If he looks just like me, and you saw him in person… I guess I can’t think of another explanation.”

Oshino had always said that people who crossed paths with abberations were more likely to encounter them in the future. And at this point, given how eventful the last year had been for both of us in terms of the supernatural, it seemed less like a path and more like we’d both merged onto the abberation autobahn at dangerous speeds. So it would be no surprise.

“…wait, Araragi. I just figured it out. Something’s been bothering me this entire time, and I didn’t realize what it was until I remembered that you said you encountered a mirror.”

“Yeah, uh. It’s a long story, but… I’ve been having some trouble with my vampiric powers lately. It’s under control, but at the moment, my reflection doesn’t show up in mirrors.”

“No, that’s not what I meant. It’s more that… he had all your features, but there was something very subtly different about him that just seemed wrong.

“An uncanny effect that I couldn’t place.

“But I think I understand now. Right now, you’ve got a cut on the left side of your forehead, correct?”

“Yeah, I got attacked by my little sisters this morning. It was my first time being held down against the bed and it left a wound that I really hope won’t scar.”

“…okay, let’s not unpack that one at the moment. But Araragi, the Araragi I met two hours ago…”

_His wound was on the right side of his face. Like he was the mirror image of you._

It was such a simple explanation that it was almost a relief.

I had encountered a mirror, and then a few hours later, Hanekawa encountered a mirror of me.

It in fact had nothing to do with vampires or reflections at all.

He was just a mirror abberation.

Now, I didn’t know what that meant, or what to do with it, but at least we knew now it was an abberation.

“Other than that, though, he really was your perfect doppelganger.”

“And all the things he said to you, those aren’t perfect at all! I’m used to abberations being destructive, but he’s… he’s just plain rude!”

“In a mirror rudely, huh… this guy has really got you going.”

“If I meet him, I’ll give _him_ seven years bad luck!”

“Eheheh. You’re sounding an awful lot like Karen right now. Getting fired up really does suit you… is that where she secretly gets it from?”

When she giggled, her short bob also bounced.

…okay, fine, I’ll admit, that wasn’t the bounce I was looking at.

I don’t know why this was so distracting to me all of a sudden. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, maybe?

“Please don’t tease me like that,” I said. “Actually… no, please, tease me as much as you need to, if it’ll make it up to. I will humbly accept all teasing in order to put my image back in your good graces again.”

“You’re so funny, Araragi. I missed this.”

“Is… that why you listened to him, even when he was saying awful things to you?”

“It’s not like… well. Hm. How to put this.”

She paused and thought for a while, before continuing:

“The things he said… they’re like all the jokes we’ve shared together, but said as if they were being repeated by a stranger who didn’t quite understand the context. Like if I teased you for having long hair for the sake of seeming dramatic, but then a stranger walked in and said ‘yeah, get a haircut!’ That’s the sort of feeling I got from the things he said.”

That’s an awfully specific example.

I’m a little surprised it’s never happened, to be honest.

“So that’s why you didn’t realize.”

“Yes… I’m a little embarrassed now that I didn’t, to be honest. …please forget the second thing I said to you, earlier?”

“What was that, again?”

“Thank you.”

Of course I remembered exactly what she had said. But if she was going to blush at me no matter what I said to her in response, I decided I’d rather try to say things that made her smile while doing it, instead.

While I was thinking about such shallow things, however, seemingly she was pondering more about the nature of the abberation she’d encountered:

“You know, not long ago, I remember reading an article that said in a study of medieval Europe, there’s evidence to suggest that the mirror was critical to the development of modern individualism. The idea is that before the mirror became widespread, people didn’t actually think about themselves as a separate entity, but rather, they thought about themselves in terms of their relationships to other people, or God. There’s evidence of this in letters, where people go from talking very matter-of-factly about their business with other people and saying no more, to writing letters to other people just for the sake of letting them know how they’ve personally been doing. It sounds a little bit non-obvious, but it seems like seeing ourselves in the mirror creates a pretty big paradigm shift in how we relate to others.”

“Where did you read an article about medieval Europe…?”

“Oh, it was some English website. I’m afraid I don’t remember which exactly.”

Was she reading foreign language websites about history just for fun?!

Truly you can take the queen of all class representatives out of school, but you can never take school out of the queen of all class representatives.

“Do you think… um… that was really complicated and I don’t quite get it, but are you saying that me not having a reflection means that I don’t have a clear sense of who I am?”

“Ah, no, that’s what I meant. I don’t think you’ll stop thinking that way once you start. It’s more of a paradigm shift for society, rather than individuals.

“But I think…

“If a mirror can create the idea of an individual in your own head, do you think a mirror abberation could create the idea of individual in other peoples’ heads?”

She said it in an uncertain tone of voice, but it seemed like she had figured it out perfectly.

I know she’s been inspired by Meme Oshino to be a free-spirited traveller, but right now she reminded me a lot of him in terms of cutting straight through the bullshit in order to understand what an abberation is about, with none of the unreliable narration you get from someone like Kaiki or Shinobu.

Just don’t start wearing any Hawaiian shirts.

You’d have trouble buttoning them up properly, for starters.

“I mean, your guess is as good as mine, but that makes a lot of sense. You’re a genius, Hanekawa.”

“Well, thank you. But the question still remains… what do we do about him?”

It was my turn to smile at her.

“Absolutely nothing, of course.”

“I don’t understand…”

“It’s not your responsibility, it’s mine. You’ve already dealt with enough of this man hurting you in my image—I’m the one who should go deal with him now.”

“There’s still a lot we don’t know about this abberation, though. And all that we do know is just a guess.”

“I know all we need to know. I know that he hurt you, and that’s all I care about.”

She gave me a look that I couldn’t possibly understand.

Her eyes went wide, but I didn’t know what it meant at all. She didn’t say anything, so I didn’t know what she was feeling, but she smiled and nodded, so I guess it must have been good.

“Do you have a plan? I believe in you, but let me know if I can help.”

I shrugged.

“I’ll figure something out. I mean, if I find him, I’ll kick his ass. For you, I’ll kick anyone’s ass. I’ll even kick my own ass.”

She opened her mouth to speak, as if she was trying to think of a good joke to follow up mine with, but seemingly coming up with nothing, she instead blessed me with something nicer. She just unfolded her arms and grabbed my hands with a very dramatic bounce.

“Thank you, Araragi.”

Then another pause, as she let go of my hands with only the briefest of soft lingers, and folded her arms awkwardly again, adding:

“There is one more thing, though.”

“Just name it.”

Another pause.

“When you find him, can you please get my bra back from him?”


	6. Coming home

The first thing I did after leaving the library, while walking home, was to call up everyone I knew and warn them. It seemed like the sort of thing that was serious enough to warrant a phone call, and besides, it would take way longer to explain via text message. I know the character trait “Araragi is bad at texting” came about when flip phones were more popular than the smart phones that everyone these days has, but nevertheless, even if there’s no excuse for it anymore, I’m definitely still just as bad at texting.

In any event, Hitagi took it in stride, and when I explained, she simply replied in her usual monotone:

“Understood. I’ll hit the office supply store at once.”

Sometimes I get confused by the relative power level rankings to everyone else, but real life isn’t a battle manga, and we did already establish that the stapler is capable of hurting me, so it’s reasonable enough to assume that it’ll hurt the mirror me, too.

Wait, was that a bit of excitement I detected in her voice?

Nah, I must be imagining it.

After calling the person on the top of my needs-to-know list, I then called the person on the bottom of it.

“Hi, Kanbaru Suruga speaking. My special ability is pressing L3 just as my stamina bar empties to instantly start dashing again.”

I could have sworn the last time I called her, she’d said her special ability was holding B to dash. But I suppose that’s just a relic of old controllers… nowadays, videogames have analogue sticks, so running mechanics are way more complicated and now force you to think about your limited stamina.

Although if she can do it infinitely, how is that different from just holding B?

“How’s it going, senpai?”

“I see you’ve finally figured out how caller ID works.”

“Nope, no clue. I just recognized the sound of your breathing.”

Unfortunately, I believed her when she said that.

It was a much more complicated explanation than the alternative, but she never was the sharpest Occam’s Razor in the cabinet, if you catch my drift.

I quickly summarized what we thought the nature of the abberation was, and warned her to be careful around him.

“Oh, that guy? Yeah, I already met him and he tried to say some weird stuff, but to be honest, I don’t really care about some alternate version of you so I told him to go take a walk.

“It was a really obvious fake, to be honest. His hair was parted on the wrong side and also the cut on his forehead was on the wrong side too.”

Oh, good, what a relief. He hadn’t managed to do any more harm, yet.

Wait, hang on.

There was something strange about what she’d said.

“…how did you know I had a cut on my forehead and that it was on a specific side?”

“Oh, that’s easy. I subscribe to Tsukihi’s daily newsletter, obviously. ‘Every Day On The Calendar!’ It’s the best way to make sure I have a new photo of Koyomi Araragi in my inbox every morning. Plus, it’s important to support local journalism.”

How much news could there possibly be to support a daily bulletin?!

I don’t think that counts as journalism.

Although I had to admit I approved of the title punning off how my name Koyomi means calendar.

“Unsubscribe from this newsletter immediately!”

“Sorry, I’m afraid I’ve already prepaid my subscription for the year.

“Also, to be honest, even without the fact that his face is mirrored, the way he was talking kinda gave it away?”

Oh no.

What had he said to her? If he’d used… that specific phrase again, I was going to punch him for every time he said it.

“If he said something weird that hurt you, I’m very sorry about that.”

“Oh, it’s nothing like that. It’s more like… how do I put this.

“The you that actually knows how to respond to flirting isn’t nearly as fun.”

“I’m hanging up now!”

“Gimme a holler if I can help, or if you find out he’s identical in other wa—”

Click.

Goodbye, Kanbaru.

I made my way home, but I didn’t know how I was going to explain this to my little sisters to protect them, since neither of them knew about the existence of abberations and I wanted to do my best to keep it that way as long as possible.

It didn’t seem like there was any way I could tell them I had an evil doppelganger without first explaining about the supernatural.

There wasn’t going to be an easy explanation for this.

I’d have to give it some thought.

“I’m home!”

I announced as I entered the house after a long day. From another room, I heard my sister’s voice call out:

“Again?!”

Yes, Tsukihi, I live here. Usually when people go out, they come back home.

These were the sorts of thoughts I was thinking as I went up the stairs to my bedroom.

But when I opened my door, I realized there was actually another explanation than “my sister was being annoying again.”

In retrospect, it should have been obvious.

There, sitting at my desk, idly perusing my stack of magazines, was a sight I’d seen many times before but had now resigned myself to never seeing again.

It was someone who looked exactly like I remembered him.

There was no uncanny effect at all. It was perfectly normal.

In front of me, sat my mirror image.

I quickly slammed the door shut before anyone noticed, which got his attention.

“Hi, Koyomi-chan. I don’t normally spend time hanging out with boys, but I’m sure I could make an exception for you~”


	7. Doppelganger

They say we’re often surprised by videos of ourselves because we’re used to seeing our faces reflected in mirrors, and hearing our voices echoing through the inside of our skulls, and they’re just subtly different enough from what we’d expect that it’s uncanny.

Well, I’m not the sort of person who’s so popular he ends up being filmed, or the type of person who’s so vain he ends up watching videos of himself, so I’d never really experienced this before, but I think probably it was an even more uncanny experience to see someone who looks exactly like your self-image of yourself speaking in a voice that doesn’t sound like what you’d expect.

Either way, I wasn’t laughing at the cutesy singsong greeting he’d given.

“Hey, what’s your name? I promised Hanekawa I’d kick your ass for what you said to her, so tell me what I should call you while I’m doing it.”

“I’m Koyomi Araragi, obviously.

“Did my set up with her help, then? Was she so impressed by your brave promise to fight me that she gave you your hero’s reward?”

“I’m not like that. Stop giving me a bad name!”

“What bad name? You mean the bad name of the mysterious pervert who’s been harrassing a poor elementary schoolgirl who was just trying to find her way home? Or the Koyomi Araragi who keeps stringing along the class representative who’s pining for him? The Koyomi Araragi who broke a middle-schooler’s heart? The vampire who was once a normal townsperson but was corrupted by a strange foreigner and now stalks even during the day without fear of sunlight or any man? Or even the embarrassing underwear thief? I’ve heard all kinds of rumours about what kind of person you are.”

“They’re just rumours! Just because you’re living up to them doesn’t mean they’re true!”

“I’m just giving everyone the story they want.

“Besides, what’s the point of having all the girls fawning over you if you don’t even take advantage of it? Isn’t leaving them all hanging the crueller thing to do? Maybe it’s for the better that I’ve come to replace you, I’m the version of you that actually shows the courage to follow through.”

Don’t try to pass it off as something courageous!

The whole point of the “the courage to” bit was that it was all embarrassing things!

In any event, there was no point in talking to him.

It was pointless.

I hadn’t resolved every problem with an abberation with violence, but I’d certainly also never resolved any problem with an abberation by talking it through, either.

Still, it felt wrong to instantly jump to violence as a conclusion.

“Please return to the mirror you came from and leave me and my friends alone.”

“Why don’t you return to the mirror? You should get out of my room, and leave my harem alone.”

How annoying.

I hated the way the words came coming out of his mouth sounded.

I looked at the table he was sitting at. Hanekawa’s bra was sitting right there, next to a pile of magazines.

“They’re not your harem! First off, give that back.”

“What, this?”

He held up the bra for dramatic effect, and then he said:

“Actually, that’s a good idea. I bet you’d look cute in it, if you padded it out. Why don’t you take your shirt off and we’ll give it a shot?”

Obviously talking wasn’t going to work.

I’ll give _him_ a shot!

“Well, I tried. Come on, get up.”

“It’ll take more than that to get me up… but it’s a start. I like that idea, though, Koyomi-chan. You know, maybe you’d be a fun addition to the harem. I could especially use someone who’s perfectly on my wavelength now that Mayoi’s gone.”

“Keep her name out of your mouth!”

“No. Aw, you’re trembling. What are you going to do, take a swing at me?”

I took a swing at him.

His choice of words had been deliberate.

You couldn’t say I punched him. You could only say I took a swing at him.

Swing and a miss.

Without even getting up, while still remaining in his chair, he somehow managed to dodge my punch all the same.

I tried again.

Another miss.

I wasn’t doing a great job at living up to my promise, to say the least.

He dangled the bra out in front of me. I tried to snatch it away, but he just pulled it back. He did this several times before I gave up, but not before I completely lost my dignity, looking like an absolute idiot.

It’s the same thing I did to Karen back when she was much younger (and smaller than me), and to have it reversed on me was unforgivable.

No more playing around.

I jumped up and kicked him right in the chest, something I knew he couldn’t dodge.

The next thing I knew, I’d been knocked onto my ass, looking up at him from the floor. He hadn’t budged from the chair even slightly, or seemed hurt in any way.

“Wow, you’re awfully weak for a fearsome vampire~”

Of course. That was why I wasn’t able to lay a hand on him.

When we came to the conclusion that it wasn’t a vampire-related abberation, we’d made a critical mistake.

We hadn’t considered all of the rumours.

While my vampiric abilities were limited and unable to be restored under threat of death from an abberation specialist, he had no such limitation.

He was me at my most powerful.

No, I bet he was more powerful, since nobody knew that there was a separate vampire, the former Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, who had been responsible for most of the vampire-related damage in this town. He could even been as powerful as her.

If that was the case, even if I did throw away my humanity and let Shinobu power me up to fight, there was no guarantee either of us would win. And either way I’d be lost to the supernatural world for good.

I couldn’t solve this problem by falling back on my usual solution after all.

I had spent all this time flirting with the supernatural, but now the supernatural was flirting back with me.

Although despite my earlier metaphor, he didn’t seem like the marrying type.

“Aw, don’t pout like that. I’m just being mean. I know you’re really just a weak little human. I think it’s cute,” he said.

Then he got up, and took a step forward.

Then another step forward.

He took a step forward onto my chest, pinning me down.

Somehow, my second time being pinned down today by an Araragi was even less dignified.

Who was spreading rumours that I was like this?!

He looked down at me, and dangling the bra over me, he said:

“I can be nice too, though! I’ll give this back to you if you just do one thing for me.”

“…what is it?”

“All you have to do is say: please, Master Araragi, let me be part of your cute girl harem too.”

If that was what it took.

If I couldn’t solve this problem with violence, at the moment, all I could do was try to solve it by talking.

“Please, Master Araragi, let me be part of your… sigh, cute girl harem too.”

“Actually, it’s a good thought, but I think I don’t like how harsh that ‘me’ sounds. Personal pronouns are always so gendered in Japanese, you know. How about you replace it with a nice cute third-person ‘Koyomi-chan’ instead?”

“That’s way too childish-sounding for someone like me!”

_That’s what makes it so good!_

“Besides, I think we both know full well that’s part of your proclivities,” he added.

This was slanderous!

But I didn’t have a choice in the matter.

I guess it couldn’t be helped.

“Please, Master Araragi, let Koyomi-chan be part of your cute girl harem too.”

“Oh, that’s good. Don’t you know, though? Right now, you’re not really my type. My fetish is perfectly ordinary skirts. Why don’t you tell me what you’ll do to impress me, Koyomi-chan?”

“How am I supposed to know?!”

“Say ‘Koyomi-chan was born to wear a nice lewd skirt for you and not even complain once when you flip it up for fun.’”

…so that’s what he was doing.

They were reminiscent of words that I’d said before.

That’s why Hanekawa’s bra had inspired him to do this.

I didn’t know how to feel about it.

Rather, I was having a feeling, but I didn’t understand how to interpret it.

“Shut up! Don’t pretend saying shit like that in this context isn’t completely out of character for me!”

I thought probably he’d get angry, and press his foot down harder.

But that must have been the reaction he was looking for, because he suddenly got a smug grin coming across his face.

Seeing that grin on his face, I suddenly understood what Shinobu had meant before.

I understood why Shinobu had said “you shouldn’t acknowledge it.”

It was the grin of a version of me who knew exactly how attractive he was.

I didn’t like it.

No, I did like it, and that was exactly the problem with it.

It was the kind of grin that tells you that your argument has been completely ignored, that actually, he’s got the better of you and you just haven’t realized it yet.

That you might as well just accept that he’s already won.

That you might as well just take comfort in being completely under his thumb.

It was that kind of smug grin.

“Then I guess you won’t get your bra back, Koyomi-chan, if you don’t say it.”

There was a pause as he waited.

I had to give him what he wanted, at least for now, or I couldn’t live up to my promise to Hanekawa.

I had to show the courage to beg to wear a skirt for him.

I sighed, and just at that, before I even started to say it, his grin grew wider.

“…Koyomi-chan was born to wear a nice lewd skirt for you, and not even complain once when you flip it up for fun.”

“Come on, you know full well that our fetish is normal skirts. You should say you’ll wear a nice long modest one so I’m the only one who can see that it makes you happy.”

“Fine! I’ll wear a nice long modest skirt so you’re the only one who can see that it makes me happy, just give me the damn bra back!”

He laughed, then he dropped it on top of my face, and took his foot off my chest.

“You get fired up really easily, don’t you? It’s funny that I’m so cool in comparison, don’t you think?”

But before I could say anything, I was interrupted by someone knocking on the door.

I was still determined to make sure nobody in the family noticed anything strange, and walking in on me and my doppelganger would definitely qualify.

I tried to think quickly.

I tried to think quickly before the doppelganger said something instead.

“Don’t come in! I’m… uh… I’m naked!”

The voice on the other side of the door was Tsukihi’s.

“What? Since when has that ever stopped you? Look, whatever, just come down, we’re going out for dinner now. And put clothes on first this time.”

Then the sound of footsteps walking away.

Thankfully, nobody suspected anything.

“Ah, well, it’s been fun, but I guess I gotta go. Unless you want to join us, of course?”

_Obviously not._

All my hard work from protecting my family from abberations would be for nothing if I did.

“Then I’ll see you when we get back, Koyomi-chan~. Don’t disappear on me now, I’m sure we’ll have lots of fun.”

It seemed like the only way I could protect my family from this abberation would be to stay away from them while I figured out how to defeat him.

“Where are you going, anyway?”

“Oh, you know.”

Apparently, they were off to the usual family restaurant that we sometimes went to when our parents had a complicated day at work and weren’t up for making dinner.

Although it couldn’t possibly be as complicated as mine.

He opened the door casually, and I quickly hurried to hide so I wasn’t visible from the hallway.

As he walked out, he called out to me:

“Ah, I’m finally getting to go on a date with my cute little sisters! Of course, I’ll have their parents as chaperones, but still, I’m thrilled!”

I had to do something about this as soon as possible.

There was no way I could just leave him to his own devices.

…but also, there was no way I could leave me to his devices either. That much was clear from my experience.

I pulled my ass off the floor, and tried to get my thoughts in order. As much as it pained me to admit it, I needed help.

I’d have to take Kanbaru up on her offer.

While I was trying to cool my head, and get my phone out, Shinobu emerged from my shadow, glaring at me.

“…while thou art busy calling for assistance, I have business I must attend to post-haste.”

“Fine, but what could it possibly be?”

“A cold shower.”

Seriously?

I thought Kanbaru was the rotten woman in my life.

This was what did it for her?

I was worrying, and she was thinking about… _that_?!

I knew the vampire had worryingly little concern for morals, but this was too much.

“No, master. Cast aspersions as you wish, but thou canst hardly blame this on me.

“Or dost thou forget that it’s thy own emotions I’m feeling right now?”


	8. Stakeout

As soon as I heard the car leave the driveway, I picked up my phone and called Kanbaru to take her up on her offer.

“Hi, Suruga Kanbaru speaking. I have a blink ability on the Q key.”

Her movement mechanics seem to be getting more and more confusing every time I talk to her. Is it just that videogames have gotten that much more complicated in this modern age of streaming, always-online multiplayer, and esports?

Come to think of it, that must be a useful ability to have during a basketball game, although I guess that’s just regular e-less sports.

At this rate they’re going end up giving her an airdash. If so, I’m getting concerned that she’s going to become the most overpowered member of the cast.

I was getting sidetracked.

“It’s Araragi. I need your help after all… I met him and he’s awful. Just the worst. It's urgent.”

“Okay, you can repay me by telling me all about it later, and don’t skimp out on the details of which positions you took. But what can I do for you right now?”

“I know it’s asking a lot, but…”

I told her where my family was heading off to, and asked if she could keep an eye on them to make sure my doppelganger didn’t do anything too disastrous.

I gave her the quick rundown of how strong I thought he was, and vaguely alluded to his threats without admitting to exactly how he’d treated me.

“Of course, senpai. I’m already tying up my running shoes, and I’m certain I can beat them there if I use the infinite stamina trick and don’t stop for red lights. I promise I’ll keep your little sisters safe for you, even if it costs my life!”

“Please stop for red lights!”

There was an implication that neither of us were saying.

Hopefully it wouldn’t come to this.

But Kanbaru was probably the only person who could take on a full powered abberation like my mirror image in a fight.

I knew it meant a lot to her that she prevented that devil’s arm of hers from hurting anyone else, and also I know that she would definitely use it to protect me.

She’d do it in a heartbeat.

Which is exactly why I didn’t want to ask her.

But we both knew it was a possibility.

“I’m out the door and on my way now. I’m going to do it no matter what, but could you tell me what I should be worried about with him? What’s his deal, other than parting his hair in the opposite way?”

“Well… we’re pretty sure he’s based on the idea of rumours. He’s the me who exists in all the rumours everyone has about me.”

“Oh, wow. There’s a lot of those! You’re a mysterious person, so people like to make up lots of those about you.”

“Please be careful. Some of them seem pretty worryingly offbase, too.”

“By the way, it’s really impressive that your only worry is your little sisters, but are _you_ safe, senpai?”

“Uh, well…”

“That’s what I thought. Listen, I can keep my eye on them at dinner, but you need to be safe too if you’re going to be able to figure out a plan to stop him for good. Actually, I already told my grandmother to expect you, so why don’t you come over and lay low at my place?”

“I could never impose on you like that!”

“Hey, senpai, I’m supposed to be the stupid one, remember? So leave saying things like that to me, and just get over already.”

I guess even she could be cool when she wanted to be.

Lately, our dynamic had been so much of a lost-puppy-biting-at-your-ankles vibe I guess I’d forgotten.

_My sincerest thanks, Kanbaru._

I put a few things in my backpack, and started heading over to the Kanbaru residence, hoping that her assurances were correct and her grandmother wouldn’t be too weird about the strange boy she already had weird ideas about coming over at this hour.

In any event, she was right about it being safer, and if there were any strange ideas about me, it couldn’t be helped.

In the grand scheme of people getting strange ideas about me, it was small potatoes compared to what the doppelganger could do.

I thought maybe I’d be able to make an excuse by saying I was there to help do some emergency room clean-up, but it ended up actually making me seem even stranger, because when I opened the door to her room I saw that it was actually mostly fine.

Well, mostly fine by her standards.

At the very least, you could see the floor.

In some places.

I closed the door behind me and took a seat on the little space there was.

We had remained on the phone all this time, and Kanbaru was giving me updates.

“It sounds like… oh, I’ve got some bad news. He truly is perverse.”

“What?!”

“He’s ordering a doria when the hamburg steak is right there! I don’t know how your reputation is going to recover from this one.”

“That’s normal! Never mind his food order, what’s he saying?”

Don’t underestimate the humble doria.

“It sounds like he’s trying to convince your parents to buy him a car… one with a big backseat, to pick up girls in.”

“Oh no.”

“Wait, no, he’s changed his mind. He’s actually asking for a New Beetle.”

“That’s too evil, even for him! How can nobody see that he’s obviously an abberation?!”

Can you imagine?

If I went from riding a humble and respectable granny bike all over town to driving a car like that, I truly would be dead to the world.

“I’ve got some good news, though: he’s at least taken his shoes off!”

“How is that good news?!”

“Sorry, I mean he’s taken his shoes off the table.”

“I DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE THAT WAS AN OPTION?”

“I think it’s… I think he’s only doing it because he’s trying to play footsies with Karen.”

Even just hearing about that made me want to die.

At least doing that with Karen meant his chances were probably 50% success, 50% liable to lose a foot.

If it was with Tsukihi, though, she might already be lost to the world.

I worry about that one.

“Wait, if you can see even that, how close are you?”

“Don’t worry, senpai. Stealth is my specialty.”

“Now I’m worrying. Since when?”

“Relax. I learned everything there is to know about successful stealth missions from studying Solid Snake through hours of VR missions.”

“Wait… hang on, in that case, wouldn’t that make you Raiden?! I’m definitely worried if you learned all your stealth skills from a game that only played because there was a pretty boy doing naked cartwheels!”

“Actually, that’s outdated. Raiden is the sort of pretty boy that appeals to male players. In terms of pure homoeroticism, nothing beats Metal Gear Solid 5 for its depiction of two hot dads fighting over an ideological split centering around the man they both love. Now please, stop distracting me, I need to listen in. I promise I’ll step in if he goes too far. I’m hanging up now.”

It’s true, she could be trusted to handle it on her own.

But I felt anxious being left waiting with nothing to do.

I looked around at the clutter of her room. Even if it wasn’t the usual cartoonish levels of apocalyptically bad, it was still a level of chaotic enough to bother me. Maybe I could focus my head a little better if I spent some time tidying her things up.

I started by snatching up the BL volume that Shinobu was currently reading.

Those things will rot your brain, you know.


	9. Shinobu

“Will thee calm down? Thy incessant pacing will solve nothing.”

How am I supposed to stay calm at a time like this?

No, she was right.

For all that I gave the Fire Sisters trouble for constantly flying off half-cocked, I seemed to be doing it a lot myself lately, and it wasn’t doing me the slightest bit of good.

I still didn’t have a solution.

I slumped down on the floor. Shinobu was sitting against the wall, next to my open backpack, so I joined her.

“We really have been trying to fight our way out of too many of our problems, haven’t we.”

“In my many a year, I only ever learned of two ways of seeking resolution to my problems. All thy talking is foreign to me, and I don’t just mean thy tongue.”

“What are those? Fighting, and running away?”

She’d definitely told me of a lot of problems she’d run away from.

It seemed to be the only reason she ever visited Japan.

Even the circumstances in which she met me were a form of running away.

It was the biggest difference between the two of us.

I’m the sort of person who refuses to run away from my problems, even when it’s the smart thing to do.

Which is why waiting here bothered me so much.

“Nay, running away is no resolution. Although I concede it be a crucial part of my being, what I mean is, when facing mine obstacles head on, I have always fallen back on but two schools of resolution: the way of the sword, and the way of the sheath.”

“What? I don’t get it.”

“Thou knoweth… there’s the way of the sword…” she said, hitting me on the head with a karate chop.

“OW!”

“…and the way of the sheath,” she said, making an obscene gesture with her hands.

“Stop that. It’s not cute when you say things like that, looking the way you do right now.”

“…I meant not that t’would suffice as a solution. Although, if he embodieth all rumours about thee, perhaps I could be of assistance in attempting that route with him, since ’tis true that one of the rumours is that thou art a—”

“Don’t finish that sentence!”

It was my turn to chop her on the head.

“WAH!”

She dramatically fell over to the floor, feigning death.

Don’t give me that petulent look, Shinobu.

I might not be strong enough to stop my doppelganger, but I can certainly stop your crass sense of humour.

“Prithee be less of a meanie!” she said, even more whinily than usual.

I could never tell when she was being sincerely childish and when she was just pretending to be childish for the sake of it.

Maybe that was why she clung to her archaic speech patterns despite having spent the past year talking only to normal people speaking normal Japanese.

It helped her mask just how crass her personality really was.

On the other hand, maybe I’d be clinging to that too if I was an immortal vampire doomed to live in the shadow of someone like me.

Like how I’d be doomed to live in this doppelganger’s shadow if I didn’t do something soon.

“I guess you’re the only vampire I can slay with an attack like that, huh.”

“Perhaps instead of thinking of him as a vampire, since thou canst not slay him that way, thou shouldst think of him as a mirror.”

“Okay, then how does one traditionally slay a mirror abberation?”

“…I know not.”

“You know, for a supposed abberation slayer, you don’t really seem to actually know much about them. What’s up with that, anyway? Shouldn’t you be an expert on this sort of thing, not just going off whatever bits and pieces you heard from some unreliable man in a hawaiian shirt?”

“A foolish question. Art thou an expert on the subject of natto?”

“I mean, no, but why would I be? I hate natto.”

“Precisely.”

She said, as if she had said something profound.

It seemed like she was just saying shit for the sake of it, if you ask me.

No knowledge had been gained in this conversation so far.

In other words, it was a normal conversation with Shinobu.

“Very well, if lack of knowledge is thy frustration, perhaps I can think of something. Perhaps… thou knoweth that to break a mirror is to bring seven years of bad luck upon thee, aye?”

“Everyone knows that. If this is supposed to be you dropping a knowledge bomb, I’m not sure you’ve even left the runway yet.”

“Master, the reason why the breaker of a mirror is to befall such a fate is because it is believed that the mirror reflects one’s very soul. ’Tis the same reason why a vampire cannot cast a reflection: because he hath no soul.

“As for why seven years, it is because the Romans believed that life was reborn anew on a seven year cycle, so if thy soul was damaged by the destruction of a mirror, there was naught one could do but wait ’til the cycle returned once more.

“Similarly, there are parts of Europe where during a wake, one must cover all mirrors in the house for fear that the soul of the departed shall travel inside the mirror instead of making its proper journey towards heaven.”

“So maybe he doesn’t have a soul?”

“Perhaps. But ’tis just as oft believed that the mirror is a portal to another universe, such as in Alice’s Adventures Through The Looking Glass, or Mirror Mirror, where the normal rules that govern the world operate in reverse. Methinks it more likely to be like the latter, since he is specifically a version of you. Although… in that episode, Mirror Universe Kirk was immediately discovered to be an imposter by the Enterprise crew just for acting normally, whereas thy imposter seemeth to be maintaining his illusion quite well.”

“Wait, how did we get from Romans to Star Trek?”

“Master, ’tis natural to associate the two. What doth thou think Romulans are?”

“Also, since when do you know anything about that show, anyway?!”

“I pray thee explain what’s so strange about that? I am from foreign lands, and thou art the one who wasn’t alive in the 1960s, not I.”

Somehow, that answer seemed suspicious, but I guess I couldn’t argue with it.

It’s certainly canon that there was a time period where she was doing nothing but playing Nintendo DS and reading Dragon Ball inside my shadow, so maybe it wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility that she got Netflix inside there, too.

If vampires are supposed to be morality parables, though, it seemed less like she was one about sexuality and more one about hikkikomori lifestyles.

“Thou art a cautionary tale about sexuality enough for both of us, after all.”

“Do you actually have any helpful advice on how to deal with a mirror abberation? You don’t, do you?”

“Nay, I have no insight. But it doth seem only appropriate that thou got into all of this trouble to begin with because thou art incapable of reflection.”

“Come on, that might be a funny joke, but don’t go saying it like it’s a real lesson.”

_It doth seem only appropriate that thou got into all of this trouble to begin with because thou art incapable of reflection._

“Shut up! Just because you say it in italics doesn’t mean it’s meaningful!”


	10. Kanbaru

When Kanbaru returned, Shinobu instantly disappeared into my shadow, although I’m pretty sure it wasn’t so quick that she didn’t see it happening.

“Wow, senpai, you didn’t need to clean up! I’m supposed to be the one helping you, remember?”

“Thanks again, Kanbaru. I owe you big time.”

“Yeah, you do. But the good news is… well, okay, the mirror you said some pretty bad stuff. But I confronted him away from everyone else, while he was in the washroom, and I think I managed to convince him that if he didn’t leave your little sisters alone for the night, I was going to track him down and use my devil’s arm secret ultra combo to launch him into space.”

“I appreciate all your hard work, but I think all those videogames you’re playing are rotting your brain.”

It did seem like the references were starting to get more specific.

“Araragi, I don’t play videogames. I’ve never played videogames, and I never said I did. I just watch a lot of Let’s Plays during the times I’m hiding in my room because I’m supposed to be doing homework. I’ll watch anything, but I don’t play them myself.”

…yeah, that’s about what I’d expect from the girl who’s cheering on the boy who’s dating her longtime crush.

“Wait, going back to the original subject, you made it sound like there’s going to be some bad news.”

“Well… the bad news kinda is that the only way I could convince him, even with the threats, was by saying that his first time had to be with you. And I was only able to buy you a day.”

“Oh.”

“And the even worse news is, he made me shake on it.”

“How is that worse news?”

“Because he didn’t wash his hands.”

“That bastard!”

“Agreed. But I did follow them all home, and staked out your bedroom for an hour just to be sure, for normal reasons, and as far as I can tell he’s keeping to his word, so at least there’s that. You haven’t eaten, right? Unfortunately, it took me so long that the only place still left to get fresh food was the only 24-hour Mister Donut in all of Japan.”

What a strange plot point to call back to.

Even I’d forgotten about it.

It’s the sort of callback that I’m sure will only confuse the people coming here from the anime even more than my typical disrespect for the fourth wall does.

By the way, while I was researching this, I found out that Mister Donut was originally an American chain, but now they’re basically out of business entirely in the US. But part of the reason why they’ve thrived as the biggest donut chain in all of Japan is because their American-style branding was able to stand out as interesting and foreign in that market despite it not being all that impressive in its own home country. In other words, it makes me wonder if there was supposed to be some sort of significance to that being the favourite of the haughty-blonde-but-now-naturalized Shinobu Oshino, or if I’m just reading too much into things.

In any event, it did cause Shinobu to emerge… albeit standing behind me, her head just barely poking out to look up at Kanbaru as she handed me a donut bag.

“Don’t worry, big sister Suruga got you one too,” Kanbaru said, offering a much larger bag to her.

Shinobu ran out, politely took it from Kanbaru’s hands, then went back to hiding behind my back again.

“Thank you!”

Hey, wait a minute.

“How come you’re capable of saying ‘you’ when it’s with her, Shinobu?”

“‘You’ is more polite. I only thou thee, master,” she said, with a mouthful of pon de ring donut. “Big sisters get a ‘you.’”

“Awww, you’re very welcome!”

“Hang on, don’t let her cutesy little sister act fool you, Kanbaru. She’s actually an ancient vampire, you know.”

“Senpai, I know you say that, but are you sure about that? The way she’s tearing into that donut seems pretty genuinely cute to me. What could be cuter than a girl getting excited about sweets?”

For one thing, I was starting to worry about Kanbaru’s sense of judgement, because Shinobu wasn’t cute when she was eating at all. She was actually tearing into that donut as if she were a lioness having taken down some kind of donut gazelle and was tearing out its guts using her powerful jaws alone.

She was lucky that there was no jelly inside, or we’d have a repeat of the blood-streaked face I saw on her as she ate the internal organs of that vampire hunter she killed during spring break.

“No, you’re wrong, she’s actually a terrifying predator. And I’m pretty sure the only reason she gets so excited about sweets is because she’s from like 1400s Europe and they hadn’t invented ‘flavours’ or ‘putting sugar in food’ back when she was alive or whatever.

“Also, hey, how come you gave her more than me?”

“Well, I figured she needs lots because she’s a growing girl, right?”

“She better not be!”

“She’s a slumbering girl now,” she said, having finished annihilating her prey. She wiped her mouth clean, and tumbled backwards into my shadow, disappearing completely from sight.

“Wow,” Kanbaru said, surprised at the sight.

Then she added:

“By the way. If she’s not a growing girl, then what’s that for? Although I think it’s rather optimistic either way.”

She was pointing at my open backpack.

Or rather, she was pointing at what was visible in my open backpack, on top of all the contents, the last thing I had hurriedly put in before heading over.

That is to say, the only thing inside my backpack that was not mine.

The bra that the mirror version of me had stolen.

“…it’s Hanekawa’s. The other me took it, but I got it back.”

Actually, come to think of it, how was he able to steal that? Wait, no, I don’t want to imagine those circumstances.

“Ohhhhh. That makes a lot of sense. Wow, that bra is big enough to live in.”

“Well… I mean, you know Hanekawa.”

“Not that well. Not in that way. To be perfectly honest, senpai, I’m deeply envious that you’d say something like that so casually implying that seeing her underwear is an ordinary everyday occurence for you. I wish I was on seeing-her-bra terms with her. My heart might belong to Senjougahara-senpai, but still, I’d happily make that bra my summer home.”

She was, after all, a proud Sapphist.

Hang on, but she’s a girl who’s been on multiple sports teams, and has been in countless girl’s locker rooms. What was there to be so dramatic about?

“Wait. Okay, putting my cards on the table here, I don’t think I understand why you’re making such a big deal about this. Aren’t girls in bras an everyday occurrence for you?”

“Senpai. Let me ask you a question. Which of the following two shirtless girls do you find more alluring: the girl who’s casually scratching her armpit and telling you all about how her boyfriend sucks, or the girl who’s blushing and starting to breath heavier because she’s embarrassed that you’re staring directly at her soft breasts but unfortunately that just makes them bounce with each breath a little bit more? Can you really say that the latter isn’t far more erotic? And if you really think it’s the former, then please describe the latter to me, because it might not be a big deal to you but I’ve never gotten to see it in my life.”

“I fold!”

“Okay, but you do owe me, so there’s an important question I have to ask you that you’re not allowed to fold on.”

I gulped, and saw my life flash before my eyes.

“…yes?”

“So, when you encountered your doppelganger in your room, I know the inning was nothing but foul balls and strikeouts, but who was pitching and who was catching?”

“What?”

“I just want to know, senpai, because it’s not every day that you get to face yourself like that and I’ve thought about it a lot. Were you topping yourself or were bottoming to yourself?”

“Kanbaru… I’m sure I don’t know what that means.”

“Well, if you can’t answer it straightly, I’ll settle for you just telling me all the sexy details.”

“It’s impossible to answer that question straightly!”

“Come on, senpai.”

“Would _you_ answer a question like that?!”

I regretted the words the instant I said them.

Obviously she would.

She would in a heartbeat, and was absolutely going to.

But if she told me her thoughts on that first, then definitely she’d expect me to share too. 

It would only be fair.

In sports, it’s important to distinguish between genuine mistakes, and less-than-ideal decisions being made because your opponent pressured you into a situation where you only had bad choices. The latter is understandable. But if you make a mistake of your own volition, that’s called an “unforced error.”

Asking her that question definitely counted as an unforced error. I only had myself to blame.

Naturally, she answered it:

“While it’s not quite your exact situation, I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’ve decided that if for some reason I ever encounter an exact copy of myself, I’m going to mercilessly hold her down and sincerely put forward my best effort to have my way with her. I know it sounds like that has some kind of dubcon implications, but hear me out: if she’s my exact copy, then being ravished by me is going to be her exact fantasy.”

“…in other words, you’d rather be the one ravished by yourself, but you’re worried about the prisoner’s dillemma.”

“The what?”

“The prisoner’s dillemma. You know, the economic paradox where a police officer tells two prisoners, separately, ‘I’ll let you free if you rat out the other one!’ Even though the best solution is for both prisoners to hold their ground so they can both go free, they usually end up ratting out the other one, because they’re worried the other one will rat them out first, and they both end up going to jail. You’re worried that your copy will act against your own interests.”

“Being held prisoner by me sounds like a pretty extreme scenario, but maybe that could be fun.”

“It’s just a metaphor!”

“It’s like… if I’m the sort of person who’d immediately roll over and bottom to myself, then if I encountered myself, then we’d both just be useless bottoms and neither of us would get what we want. But if I’m the sort of person who’d ravish myself, then at least one of us would get ravished, and then the other one would get to watch herself get ravished, which is still pretty good.”

“You’ve really thought about this a lot, huh?”

“Usually only at night, when I have trouble sleeping.”

At this rate, I was going to have trouble sleeping too!

“But you’re saying you wouldn’t normally want to ravish another girl.”

“Senpai, as a devout Sapphist, I have nothing but respect and admiration for all girls who get ravished by other girls. But I also take pride in my devotion to bottoming.”

“Devotion?”

I found myself playing the straightman.

Or maybe it was just that I was playing the straight man.

On the one hand, this was a pretty painful conversation. On the other hand, it really was a good moment to bond with my junior and finally learn what the difference between me as a man and her as a Sapphist was.

The difference between my fetishes and her devotion.

“I’m the sort of girl who needs someone who’s confident enough that she knows exactly how she wants to have her way with me, regardless of what that way is, and I won’t accept anyone who shows a moment’s hesitation. In this world of cute princesses waiting for their cool senpai to notice them, I’m just one more, but I won’t settle for anything less. 

“I’m so devoted to bottoming that I’m the sort of girl who makes posts on Twitter complaining about top scarcity, and then when girls respond saying they won’t be gentle with me, I go to their profiles and scour them for even the closest hint of something like a photo of Cate Blanchett in a suit with a ‘I’m just a hole, ma’am’ caption posted within the past ten years, and if I find one I respond ‘SILENCE, BOTTOM’ and block them.”

She truly was on a level of devotion beyond what I could imagine.

If my brain was merely the size of a galaxy, hers was so vast that she was ascending the divine staircase.

I was starting to understand the difference.

It was clear that the fetishes of someone like me, a man who has actually touched a girl’s breast before, could never compare to her level of devotion.

I might have been her senpai, but when it came to her level of intensity, clearly I was the junior with much to learn.

However, it also made me remember what she’d said earlier.

Was it an inconsistency? Maybe there was just some nuance I was somehow not understanding.

No, it was definitely an inconsistency!

“The fact that you’re blocking them all might be why girls don’t show you their bras in an erotic way, you know.”

“Maybe, but at least I’m pure. So did you see his dick, senpai?”

“Absolutely not!”

I slammed my hands down.

I didn’t need to. He looked just like me. Obviously I know what he looks like.

Although, if he’s actually the me who exists in rumours, maybe that’s not true? I wasn’t sure what those rumours would be. I tried to imagine what rumours could possibly have been spread about my… manhood.

“Prithee desist, I’m trying to slumber,” my shadow grumbled.

…well, if I had been asked to stop thinking about it, then I suppose it couldn’t be helped.

“Anyway, senpai, I told you all about my selfcest fantasy, so it’s only fair, you have to tell me about your real-life one now.”

Finally, at long last, I’d been punished for my unforced error earlier.

From here on, any less-than-ideal decisions would come from the situation my opponent had created for me. The initial mistake had been mine, but I couldn’t take responsibility for any bad choices I made in this conversation with the former star athlete from here on out.

She continued:

“I know he’s a mirrored version of you, so was he the top to your bottom, or was it the other way around? If we’re going to write out this ship name in the tags, it’s very important to get the order right.”

“I’ll answer your question, but I promise I don’t have a clue what that means.”

“Don’t you know? There’s lots of different ways you write out the pairings in ships. For example, in the west, nowadays there’s a lot of cute ways of combining names into a single word, but it used to be that you’d just put a slash between the two names and put them in whatever order you think feels right. Personally, my theory is that this is because the original inventors of the term slashfic were writing about Kirk/Spock, and there’s no way to put those two names together that sounds good. Can you imagine reading a fic that said it was about ‘Spirk’?”

I couldn’t imagine reading something about those two characters, regardless of what name you put on it!

Incidentally, we sure do seem to be talking about Star Trek in this one as much as we normally talk about Doraemon. Is this what they call cultural exchange?

“Hang on, you said the order doesn’t matter, right? Spirk is definitely pretty bad, but what if—”

Ah.

No.

I figured out what the other way around would be in my head just soon enough to save me from saying it out loud.

You really couldn’t do the other way, either.

Although I suppose it would be more surprising if that you didn’t find that sort of thing inside the fic itself.

“You see the problem. But actually, that’s only true in the west. In Japan, we use a cross instead. So you could describe your ship as Araragi x Araragi.”

“That’s a dangerous thing to put between a vampire!”

“Furthermore, the order is of absolute importance. You absolutely must put the name of the top first, and the name of the bottom second. So tell me, is it Araragi x Araragi, or Araragi x Araragi?”

“Those are both exactly the same!”

“In the original Japanese, one of the two was written in katakana.”

That’s still the same if you say it out loud!

Also, don’t lie about fake translations to cover for the fact that your joke doesn’t make any sense.

This is strictly an original English language production.

“What about portmanteaus?”

“I don’t see what sailors have to do with anything, senpai. Or was that also a wordplay that only made sense in the original?”

“A portmanteau is when you combine two words together into one. Please spend less time watching people play videogames and more time on your studies!”

“Ah, I see. Yeah, you can do that, but it specifically has to be the first two syllables of each name. So in your case, it would be AraAra.”

“AraAra, huh…”

“Ha ha, you sound like some big sister type feigning shock.”

Another joke that doesn’t localize well.

If this got adapted into an anime episode, the fansubbers would probably put something like “TL Note: Ara ara is the Japanese phrase for ‘my my’” at the top of the screen, even though there’s already too many things written on the screen, and also no joke could possibly be funny if you have to see a simultaneous dictionary translation of all its elements anyway.

But I did have to admit, it was pretty fun to say out loud.

“AraAra, what a scandalous pairing.”

“Okay, that’s it, senpai, no more delaying. Top or bottom? I need to know so I can go update my spreadsheet.”

“I don’t know! It’s complicated.”

Also, what kind of spreadsheets are you keeping?!

“Then tell me the details of your encounter, and Dr. Kanbaru will diagnose you accordingly.”

Hang on, I’d heard of boys and girls playing doctor, but I don’t think she’d gotten the rules right here at all.

I suppose I couldn’t get out of this one, though.

I had promised her.

“Well… there’s not really that much to say. I put up a valiant fight against him, trying to get Hanekawa’s stolen undergarments back from him, but unfortunately he was just too strong and knocked me down.”

“Go on…!”

She was getting far too into it.

Kanbaru, don’t lie on the floor with your legs in the air and a giddy grin on your face as if we’re middle-schoolers at a slumber party sharing gossip that we think is scandalous but is actually embarrassingly mild! Sit up immediately, and act normally, please!

Well, maybe I couldn’t make her sit up. And acting normally was definitely out of the question. But I had to at least prove this was at least high school level gossip.

“Then he promised me he’d give it back if I said a bunch of really degrading things. But what else could a hero like me do but step up, and show the courage to do something difficult for the sake of liberating that which was stolen?”

“Of course! Like what?”

“Well, it was things like, ‘please, let Koyomi-chan be part of your cute girl harem and wear a skirt lewdly’ and such.”

“Ahhhhh…”

Apparently, I should have been a little more monotone in my delivery of that line.

Kanbaru, it’s rude to get nosebleeds in front of vampires if you didn’t even bring extra food. What am I supposed to do about it making my stomach rumble like that?

Besides, at this point, isn’t that anime cliché so old it’s even more archaic than the way Shinobu talks?

“And then what?” she asked.

“And then nothing! He had to go for dinner, so I called you, and that’s it.”

“That’s too bad. Still, it’s a little disappointing that you even somehow managed to find a way to make selfcest hetromorna—

“That is, hetelor—

“Hataronomo—

“Heteromonoti—

“…you know, that word where it means that you treat being straight like it’s just the normal thing. That’s you. You took a fantasy where you get taken by a boy who looks just like you, and somehow managed to no-homo it.”

“He wanted to put me in a skirt! There was the whole ‘Koyomi-chan’ thing! How isn’t that homo?!”

“I’m just saying, senpai, take a look at any of the books on my shelf. You’re going to find that they get a lot dirtier than just putting on a short skirt.”

No.

I mean, for one thing, no, I am definitely not going to read any of that trash! But I also had to put my hands down.

“Not a short skirt, Kanbaru. A normal skirt.”

“Coward.”

“No! You don’t understand. You need to learn something important from your senpai here: the best thing in the world is a girl in a perfectly ordinary skirt. I’ve said that in previous volumes, and it’s still true. A short skirt means that the object of the fetish is the provocativeness of the skirt itself. But if your fetish is the perfectly ordinary, that means that even bashful girls can’t escape it, because they’re _always_ triggering it no matter what they do. Only by being actively lewd can you avoid that kind of gaze… but then they’ve been forced to be actively lewd, and that’s almost as good too.”

“But you're still just staring at an ordinary skirt…?”

“No, my dear junior, that’s where you’re mistaken. If you saw someone staring intently at the wrapping paper of a Christmas gift, you wouldn’t think that they’re really excited about gift wrap, would you?”

There was an stunned silence, and I could practically see the lightbulb go off above her head.

“Senpai… no, or should I say sensei? I see I’ve underestimated you. I’m awestruck. I realize now that I’m a thousand years too soon to challenge your title as master pervert. Thank you for bestowing your kind wisdom on me. I see now that the appeal of putting Araragi-senpai in a skirt isn’t about protecting your reputation of only liking girls, but rather, it’s about the appeal of shaking a package on Christmas morning to figure out how big the contents are.”

“Let’s stick to hypotheticals, please.”

“Okay, it’s like hypothetically shaking a package on Christmas morning to figure out how big the contents are.”

“You’re an absolutely rotten woman!”

“Thanks, senpai! You really know how to compliment a girl.”

It seemed like this painful tangent was going to go on forever, but suddenly it took an abrupt turn when Kanbaru confessed:

“By the way, there’s something I don’t understand.”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

I was pretty sure there were a lot of things she didn’t understand.

To be honest, I sometimes worried about her quite a bit.

“So I understand why you can’t use your chuunibyou powers against him. That part makes sense to me.”

“Hold on, what’s with this Middle School Syndrome accusation? For one thing, I’m 18 years old! If we were in the west I’d even be considered an adult!”

“Yes, but you get your powers from an 8-year-old, right? So the two of you average out to a single middle schooler.”

“Actually, she’s over 600 years old, she only looks like she’s 8.”

“Senpai, please respect yourself more than to turn into the sort of person who says ‘actually, she’s over 600 years old, she only looks like she’s 8’ as if any adult would find that acceptable.”

“Good thing you’re not an adult. You’ve got a lot to learn about the world.”

Actually, that was a pretty half-assed save. I couldn’t argue with her on that.

Well, I could argue, but she was right that it wouldn’t be compelling.

Thankfully, she left it at that.

“Anyway, I get why you can’t use your chuunibyou powers, but if he’s just based on every rumour there is about you, why don’t you try spreading a new rumour to give him some new weakness?”

I had expected her to say something else stupid, but actually, it seemed like she had immediately cut to the heart of it.

“You’re a genius!”

“R-really? Senpai, thank you…”

She was starting to tear up a little.

Okay, let’s tone down the emotional reactions.

But it really did seem like an idea that could work.

I doubted that we could easily spread a rumour that was able to counter something as powerful as “he’s an immortal vampire,” but maybe we could at least give him some kind of weakness he could exploit.

“We could give him a weakness like ‘he couldn’t ever hurt someone who looks cute in a skirt,’ then you’d be safe to do whatever you wanted!”

“Never mind the skirts! You’re as bad as he is.”

Anyway, we sat down and spent a while brainstorming and I think we came up with a pretty good plan.

It wouldn’t solve our problem entirely, but since Kanbaru’s threat had only given us until morning, it would at least buy us a little more time while we figured things out.

Eventually, there was nothing left to do but get some rest for the day ahead of us tomorrow.

Which was a problem on its own.

I had been so distracted by everything else, I hadn’t considered the problem of the facts that I wasn’t able to go home, the abandoned school had burned down, and the only people I knew who could put me up were all girls.

In other words, I had nowhere I could safely sleep except in my female junior’s bedroom.

Obviously I have nothing but respect for Kanbaru, who has saved my life on many occassions including just now, and also nothing but respect for my wonderful girlfriend Hitagi who I love, but I think the difference between the two could be pretty succinctly described by the fact that I refer to Kanbaru by her family name but Hitagi by her given name.

There was no doubting that despite our free banter, there was a greater distance between the two of us than there was with my girlfriend. As there should be. I had no intention of violating that.

But you can’t deny the fact that a boy staying over in a girl’s room overnight, even with pure intentions, comes across in a certain way.

I deny the intent, but not the bad optics.

When we called Hitagi to tell her our plan for tomorrow, she said she understood, but then she also added that she hoped Kanbaru would help me get some good practice in, which we both agreed to interpret as a terrifying joke that she was only comfortable making because she knew about the purity of our intentions.

Now, if it had been Hitagi’s place I had been sleeping over at, that would be another matter entirely.

I don’t think either of us had done nearly enough studying to be ready for that test, mind.

But it would be hard to keep pure intentions.

However, it still left us with a problem, which was that we couldn’t just pull up an extra futon and have me sleep separately without having the risk of Kanbaru’s grandmother checking in on her in the middle of the night and discovering us.

Kanbaru’s carefree curfew-less life would be ended in an instant, I’m sure.

“I’ve got another solution for that, but I don’t think you’re going to like it, senpai. Can I ask you to please forgive me in advance?”

Now that was a dangerous question, but given the circumstances, I didn’t have any choice in the matter.

As it turned out.

She was correct.

I didn’t like her solution.

I didn’t have a better one, but I still didn’t like it.

Her reasoning was that if her room looked like it normally did, then her grandmother checking in wouldn’t apply much scrutiny in the darkness, and then I’d be in the clear so long as I kept quiet.

The logic was sound.

Unfortunately, in practice, what that meant was that I was going to be sleeping buried in her overwhelming collection of BL novels.

BL piled high enough to cover my body entirely.

I suppose that’s appropriate enough for a fic published on AO3.

But I’d be lying to if I tried to act like it didn’t have an impact on the dreams I had that night.


	11. Hitagi

That morning, I snuck out the window while Kanbaru made a lot of distracting noise. Together we scrounged up a perfectly acceptable breakfast from the convenience store, made a series of phone calls together (with her laughing at me every time I tried to send an agonizingly slowly typed text message), and then eventually went our separate ways to enact our plan.

However, while Kanbaru seemed to be successful in her part of spreading rumours, neither Shinobu nor I seemed to be having much luck in actually tracking him down. He had disappeared from my house, which was good, but also meant that he was at large, so we had no choice but to spend yet another afternoon scouring everywhere we could think of in the hopes he’d be there.

This seemed to be a problem that came up a lot.

At least I had my bus pass on me, so he couldn’t have gotten that far. Although I guess that’s no sure guarantee either.

Still, after several hours, we had no luck tracking him down.

Even by the afternoon, he hadn’t turned up. But while we were still searching, I was interrupted by a phone call from Hitagi.

“Koyomi, I did the thing you two asked me this morning. Could you please come over to my place now?”

Ordinarily I’d be immediately on my way, consequences be damned, but in this case I did have a responsibility to deal with this current abberation first.

Please, wait for me, Hitagi! I promise we’ll resume working on our beautiful romance until after all this is dealt with.

She clarified, in a monotone:

“Stop breathing so heavily into the phone. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but it’ll have to wait. What I meant was I need your immediate heroic rescue, please. I have a poor imitation of my boyfriend here and I’d like to exchange him for the real thing.”

In other words, the mirror version of me was inside her home.

She was sharing that tiny space with the doppelganger that had no sense of restraint and no sense of decency.

She sounded remarkably calm given the circumstances.

But she always sounded calm. She’d warmed up so much since our initial meeting that it was sometimes hard to believe she was even the same person, but she still had the same monotone delivery as ever, even when she was saying lovey-dovey things (!!!).

At first I thought she was still failing to express those feelings that she always struggled to, even after the Senjougahara Personality Rehabilitation Program was complete, but I eventually came to realize that she was just calmly expressing those feelings in her own way, and she was trusting that they would come through on their own without any unnecessary exertions.

Or maybe, after having spent years with her ailment, she’d come to appreciate the dramatic weight of deadpan.

I don’t know for sure. All I did know was that I could spend all day thinking about how much I love the sound of her voice and how much I think it’s perfect, but.

Right now.

Even if she’s calm, there’s no way I can be! I can’t be cool about her sharing an apartment with an attractive man who definitely wants to have his way with her! I’m incapable of it!

“I’m on my way!”

“Be quiet. Sorry, Koyomi, not you, the other one. Please hurry.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can! I don’t have any special movement abilities but I’ll run as fast as I can!”

“Thanks. I’ll see you soon.”

I ran as fast as I could to her apartment.

Which is to say, I managed to make it about 90 seconds or two blocks of running as fast as I could before I had to slow down, followed by about 15 minutes of me powerwalking while trying to catch my breath.

I was glad that Kanbaru wasn’t here to see me like this, because it would probably annihilate her hero worship of me for good to see me like this.

Powerwalking while gasping for breath was possibly the one thing I could think of that was somehow even less dignified than New Beetle ownership.

In any event, I at least managed to catch my breath before ringing her doorbell. I couldn’t show weakness in front of my enemy, after all. He had a way of seizing on it.

Hitagi met me at the door, armed with a stapler, and greeted me with a quick kiss on the cheek.

“Hitagi! Are you okay? He didn’t do anything, did he?”

“I’m fine. The only thing he’s done is teach me about some very distressing rumours about my boyfriend. Please come in.”

Uh oh.

I entered the tiny one-room apartment, not sure if I should be prepared for a fight—Hitagi was armed with a dangerous weapon, after all—but after stepping into the landing, I could see that he was in the kitchen… handcuffed to the refridgerator.

In that case, I took off my shoes.

And then we approached him.

“Koyomi-chan~ I waited for you, just like I promised your harem girl! Your beloved and I have just been talking about you while we waited. You know, I don’t really think you’re taking advantage of how extreme some of her tastes secretly are… what kind of girl just keeps handcuffs lying around?”

“I heard a rumour that vampires have a psychological weakness where they can’t ever escape a pair of handcuffs, even if they’re strong enough to,” she said.

Good work, Kanbaru. We hadn’t said it to Hitagi in so many words, just told her to get a new pair of handcuffs, so the rumour must have reached her independently. Kanbaru had done her part, now it was up to me.

“I was just telling her that it would be more fun to put you in the handcuffs, though. There’s a lot of things I could teach you to do to cute little Koyomi-chan while he’s like that, baby.”

This was getting out of control!

I would never say anything that corny!

To say nothing of having absolutely no interest in being handcuffed!

“Koyomi…-chan?”

She seemed surprised.

“Oh? Didn’t he tell you? Because last night, in the heat of the moment, little Koyomi-chan here moaned a very interesting promise to me.”

“I-it wasn’t like that! I didn’t moan! You used violence to force me to say a thing, so I said it!”

“Well, if I’m misrepresenting it, how about you say it again so she’ll understand exactly what your intonation was?”

“I refuse!”

“Fine, fine… I guess I’ll just have to give my best impression, then.”

“I’ll do it!”

“Go on~”

I sighed.

I sighed out of frustration, but he just seemed to interpret that as a sign of weakness, which it was, so he found it amusing, which it wasn’t.

“He made me say something like… ‘Koyomi-chan was born to wear a nice normal skirt for you, and not even complain once when you flip it up for fun.’”

“Ah. Huh. Interesting,” Hitagi said in her usual monotone.

Then she glanced away, took out a tissue, and wiped her nose. I couldn’t help but notice that the tissue was red when she discarded it.

Has the air been thinner than usual around here, or what…?

“It was only because he made me do it!” I said.

“You know, at first I thought I was just going to replace you, Koyomi-chan, but I think you really would make a good addition to the harem. It’s very important that Hitagi is happy as the harem second-in-command. If she has both the cool vampire version of me and the bashful Koyomi-chan in a skirt, that’s pretty much the bisexual dream, isn’t it?”

“I’m not bashful and I’m not wearing a skirt! Stop… stop just saying things because you feel like it!”

Hitagi tilted her head.

Just by a normal amount, although I’m nervous to imagine what they’d turn that gesture into if this story got an anime version.

Actually, it was so slight you could barely see it.

“To be perfectly honest, one Koyomi is intense enough,” she said.

“It could be complementary, you know? For all the nasty rumours, Koyomi-chan can be very sweet when it comes down to it, isn’t he?”

“Please don’t talk about Koyomi-chan like he’s not in the room!” I yelled.

There was silence.

Nobody responded.

If there was something unusual with what I’d said, it wasn’t going to be acknowledged.

Somehow, that was even worse than being teased for it.

“…I mean, don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room.” I corrected myself, much too late.

“Yes, that’s something I like about him very much. I don’t think you have that quality at all, so I don’t see what I’d find appealing in you besides your good looks, which I already get from my current hot boyfriend.”

“Why not both, though? I can be the Koyomi that XXXXs you over and XXXXs you XXXX in your XXXXXX XXXXX, and he can be the one who holds you tenderly while I do, and strokes your hair, and tells you ‘good girl, good girl’ while you take it.”

“Not funny.”

“OW!” he yelled.

The next thing I knew, she had unloaded an entire clip of her stapler into his forehead, and was now reloading with a cold glare.

But he was just showing us that smug grin from before.

That life-ruining grin.

The grin that makes you want to accept that he’s somehow won, even if you haven’t figured out why yet.

I was pretty sure I’d never made that face in my life.

But I could see that Hitagi was just as weak to it as I was.

And just as surprised.

“Koyomi, I thought you said even at that power level, my normal attacks should still hurt him…?”

They would have hurt me, even at my strongest.

No, I was certainly they’d hurt him.

…and that was the problem.

“I think…” I started, unsteadily. “I think he might just be a masochist.”

“I shan’t deny the claim!” he said with a laugh.

A familiar laugh.

A familiar laugh to accompany a familiar line.

A laugh that made Shinobu grumble from inside my shadow about the unfairness of being imitated like that.

As if only now she was realizing how much it stung to see a dim reflection of yourself like that.

“Please, not now!” I snapped back. “I can only handle one misbehaving vampire at a time—OW!”

No, he didn’t suddenly attack me.

This wasn’t a surprise attack from the mirror me breaking free of his shackles, or anything like that.

It was just a surprise attack from Hitagi suddenly stomping on my foot.

“What was that for?!”

“I can’t hurt him if he’s a masochist, so I’ll have to take it out on you instead.”

“I don’t think the logic here is sound at all!”

He had just kept quiet while we riled each other up, but now he finally said:

“Maybe you can’t handle her after all, Koyomi-chan. Maybe it’s best you leave after all. But that’s fine, I can’t separate you from your real soulmate, anyway. You can take your thrall Shinobu with you, and I’ll take your harem.”

In a literal sense, it was true that Shinobu was my soulmate.

She was, in fact, literally inextricable from my soul, due to the complicated events that happened before I’d even met Hitagi.

Due to the complicated events that inadvertantly led to me meeting Hitagi, in fact.

I have to admit, I sometimes worry about how Hitagi feels about that, because I think she does deserve a perfect uncomplicated boyfriend who doesn’t have his fate entwined with the sad faded shadow of a beautiful immortal vampire.

I mean, I think most girls deserve better than that, to be honest, but I especially thought she did.

I worried that by bringing up Shinobu, he would be hitting our relationship in its weak point.

“If you think that by bringing how Koyomi has bravely decided to live with the consequences of refusing to let someone die, you’re hitting our relationship in its weak point, then you’re underestimating a love you’ll never understand. Out of all the false rumours about my Koyomi that you’re living up to right now, by far the most offensive is that he would debase himself by suggesting that.”

She said it in her usual monotone, but nothing else could have warmed up my heart as much as that.

Needless to say, I was deeply moved.

Hitagi, you can step on my foot as much as you want if you say something as sweet as that afterwards!

“Koyomi… I think he’s just wasting our time,” she said to me.

“Yeah. You’re right. Is it okay if we leave him here while I figure out how to get his stupid face stomped back into the mirror where it belongs? I think it’s probably the safest thing.” 

“That should be fine.”

Presumably her father was away on business once again. Good thing.

We always seemed to take advantage of that only in the strangest of ways.

“You’re both really cute. Do you really think these handcuffs are going to hold me? It was a clever idea, but I’m stronger than your sire was at her greatest strength. Are you sure I won’t just cut my arms off and regrow them instantly sans handcuffs? I’ll make you a deal, though. I’ll promise to stick around if you do something for me, Koyomi-chan.”

He was bluffing.

I was sure of it.

You can’t cheat your way out of a psychological weakness.

If you’re the kind of vampire who can’t enter a door univited, you can’t just kick the door in. Abberations follow strict rules that can’t be weaseled out of.

My whole problem with the vampirism had been caused by that fact.

However.

…I was willing to concede that maybe the plan devised by Kanbaru Suruga, the Queen of Remedial Classes, might have a flaw in it that I haven’t yet realized.

It was a possibility, at the very least.

“…what is it you want?” I reluctantly asked.

“Come closer,” he said.

“Didn’t we already do the scene where you sexually menace me?”

“Hey, I’ve been on my best behaviour ever since that lesbian devil menaced me. Do you really think you can get away with providing so little fanservice in this much time? Especially when it’s so cute when you’re embarrassed about it, Koyomi-chan. Come here.”

“…if I do what you say, you’ll promise to stay here, in your restraints, and leave everyone else alone?”

“Sure. I’ll give you a whole day, even.”

As much as he was definitely a malicious being through and through, it did seem to at least be the case that he stuck to his word.

Could it be that out of all the dubious things said about me, nobody had ever suggested that I wasn’t a man of my word?

Certainly I would like to believe that everyone recognizes that.

“…fine.”

I came closer to him, which was awkward, since he was sitting on the floor with a single hand handcuffed to the refridgerator and all. I had to kneel in front of him for it to work.

I’m sure it was an arrangement that could be found in any one of Kanbaru’s books.

“I’m not doing anything weird, though, I’m warning you now,” I said.

“I don’t want anything weird. Just be a good girl and give me everything you’ve given to her, okay?”

“Absolutely not!”

“In that case, I’ll accept her giving it to me instead. I’ll even let you watch.”

“Koyomi, I—” Hitagi started to say something, but I cut her off before she had a chance to even hint at whatever it was.

This was my fault, and my responsibility.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

“Attagirl.”

He put his free hand in my hair and nudged me forward. Fine. I said I’d do it.

No matter how much he makes fun of me for it, I’m not actually bashful. I’m determined.

I closed my eyes, and leaned in to kiss him.

He tasted like absolutely nothing.

It hardly felt like anything at all.

I guess it really is the case that the interesting thing about a kiss is the unfamiliar. The negotiation. He was just nothing more than the same as me.

There was no appeal at all.

Absolutely none.

“Come on. I know there was more than that.”

Unfortunately, I immediately knew what he meant.

And reluctantly, without saying another word, I put my hand between his legs.

Just a touch too gentle for him to even feel, or notice.

I felt him.

At least someone was enjoying himself.

Actually, come to think of it, this really was an encounter designed exactly for Kanbaru in another way, too.

It truly was an encounter that had no climax, no resolution, and no meaning.


	12. Hitagi, outside

Absolutely nothing happened after that, and Hitagi and I finally managed to escape from that strange situation. We stood outside of her door, catching our breath after all that.

“You know, despite what you said, I didn’t think his face was stupid at all. I thought it was rather handsome. It’s just too bad about the rest of his personality,” Hitagi said.

For some reason, this was the funniest thing in the world to me.

I’m sure it was just the stress of the situation finally relieving itself, but I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Well, good thing you’ve got the real thing,” I said while laughing.

“Eheheheh.”

She covered her mouth, and let out a genuine giggle.

I laughed even more. It really was funny. I wasn’t happy about the stressful situation that had caused it, but I was relieved we could at least share this moment.

But when she lowered her hand, I realized she was blushing.

“…to tell you the truth, I’ve been biting my tongue the entire time so he wouldn’t notice anything. I wasn’t quite as calm as I looked… I’m more than a little embarrassed.”

I just laughed even more.

I guess even the perfect sweet Hitagi was a little bit rotten too.

“Yeah? Should I go back, so you can get some more fanservice featuring the super cool attractive vampire with a commanding presence and ‘Koyomi-chan?’ Ha ha ha ha ha.”

She giggled too.

“I don’t want someone cool, or any of those other things either. I just want my Koyomi who’s perfect as-is.”

She came up close to me, and put her hand on my chest.

Then she said, quietly:

“By the way… that thing he said at the end, about you copping a feel while kissing me… was that true?”

“No! Of course not.”

And I didn’t even think it was something particularly appropriate for him to be joking about.

I’m happy to jokingly grab any number of other girls in my life because it means nothing to anyone and it’s in good fun.

It’s not a matter of being nervous around girls.

To make use of a baseball metaphor, we might have only been standing on first base, but in our hearts we’d already hit a home run.

However.

In the past, Hitagi had a traumatic experience with an evil man that left her uncomfortable with certain things, and I was more than happy to just follow her lead on whatever would make her feel safe, for however long it took for her to feel that way.

I would do anything and wait however long it took if it was for the sake of her being comfortable.

We’d discussed this many times, and right now, it didn’t need to be spoken of any further.

I knew she was sick of talking about it.

So all I said was:

“It was just something I thought about. I mean, fantasized about. I didn’t actually consider it seriously. It was just a passing thought.”

She nodded.

“That’s what I figured.”

She came a little bit closer, as if to hide the fact that she was blushing.

Unfortunately for her, it only revealed that, despite the fact that she’d teased me about the exact same thing earlier, she was the one who was breathing a little heavier.

Then she gave me a sweet-tasting kiss, and only pulled back so she could ask:

“Would you like to?”

“I-I mean, if you’d like…”

She put her hand where I’d put my hand on the other me.

Obviously I was not bashful or embarrassed, but still, I felt like I was at a disadvantage. By putting her hand there, she’d just learned something about how I was feeling about the whole situation.

Something that I couldn’t hide.

The events of the past chapter had gotten me feeling in a certain mood.

“To tell you the truth, I feel the same way,” she admitted.

After that, we mutually decided that it would be much better if we expressed our feelings without using any more clumsy words.

It took a good while for us to part ways.


	13. Ononoki

When I finally came home for the first time in nearly a day, I was feeling calmer, but it was the sort of calmness that comes from determination.

First I was kept out of my own home, and now Hitagi was unable to go to hers, because of this malicious abberation.

He needed to go, and at this point, I was willing to resort to enlisting the aid of one of our local heavy hitters to help me deal with him.

I’d rather worry about owing something to a human than keeping track of an abberation that wanted to take everything in my life.

He needed to be slain immediately.

If that’s what it took.

“Hi, everyone, I’m home! I’m very sorry about my behaviour last night, I’m sure it was the result of some kind of short-lived head trauma that I’ve since recovered from that caused me to say a bunch of things I definitely didn’t mean!” I called out to the entire house as I took off my shoes.

Tsukihi came out of her room to greet me.

“Whatever, weirdo. Hey, a bunch of strange girls my age were here looking for you, I think they—”

“Never mind that. I need to talk to that jumbo doll of yours.”

“Okay, whatever. It’s not in my room, I think Karen was using it for martial arts practice. You should definitely go talk to that doll, though, instead of bothering us normal humans.”

Ouch.

The doll, of course, referred to an actual doll.

An actual doll that had been constructed out of the corpse of a 12-year-old girl, although in actuality she was older than that and did not share any of the memories of the corpse she was created from, and was the shikigami servant of the violent onmyouji Kagenui, wielder of the powerful but confusingly vague special ability Unlimited Rulebook.

You know, come to think of it, I don’t really think I’ve made a big enough deal about how messed up her whole concept is, even before you get to the part where she now pretends to be a life-sized doll that my little sisters won in a UFO machine so she can live in our house.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think you should be creating servants out of dead 12-year-olds, _or_ hiding them in UFO machines.

Well, it was too late to bring up my objections now, although really, I’m surprised it was the first time it had occurred to me.

In any event, I rescued her from Karen’s room, and dragged her back to mine.

“Yaaay. Peace, peace. Thank you, monstieur. I’m ready to live a life of peace now.”

“Sorry. I need your help with some violence, actually.”

“Okay, no problem. Let's do some violence.”

The dream of peace was abandoned that quickly?!

Truly I worry for our modern times.

“Who should I kill for you, kind monster sir?” she added.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, given our recent history. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to go that far, and in any event, not even her Unlimited Rulebook would be powerful enough to take on the mirror me in a fair fight.

She couldn’t even beat the teenage hypebeast form of Shinobu, let alone someone with the power of the full classical beauty form of Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade.

“Please don’t kill anyone. I just need to get in contact with your master.”

“Impossible. —he said with a dashing look.”

Don’t return to old gimmicks so inconsistently! Her writing really is all over the place, isn’t it.

“Come on, it’s an emergency.”

“Sorry, monstieur. I don’t know how to get ahold of her.”

What an unreliable servant!

“What about…”

Even then, I was nervous about this idea, but it really did seem like I needed to leave this abberation to the experts, and the fact that the mirror me was currently preventing Hitagi from getting home was making me feel much more willing to make a rash decision than I might otherwise.

And unfortunately I only knew one abberation expert who had any sort of reliable contact method.

“…what about Izuko Gaen, then?” I asked.

“Yay, peace peace. No problem. Take this, and spread love and peace.”

She handed me a fancy business card holder. I opened it up, and there were exactly eight business cards, all with Izuko’s name on them in different styles and fonts. I’m no expert when it comes to such boring adult matters, but they seemed rather impressively—or at least expensively—printed.

However, every single one of them had the phone number crossed out, with a different new phone number written on it, sometimes multiple times.

Come to think of it, she did seem to have an awful lot of cell phones, didn’t she? I supposed it only made sense that she also had a lot of phone numbers.

Well, all I could do was go through each one.

“The number you have called is no longer in service.”

“The number you have called is no longer in service.”

“The number you have called is no longer in service.”

“The number you have called is no longer in service.”

“Sorry, that’s not a valid phone number. Please hang up and try your call again.”

“The number you have called is no longer in service.”

“Sorry, the number you have called is no longer in service due to unpaid phone bills. If you have alternate contact information for this user, please forward it to our billing depar—”

I had only one business card left. If I couldn’t get through to her with this phone number, I didn’t know what I would do.

I dialed it.

I expected to be disappointed, but I didn’t realize just how disappointed I was going to be.

Somehow, the universe anticipated my base levels of disappointment and found a new way to exceed them beyond my wildest dreams.

Ordinarily I would have hung up the second I heard the voice greeting me on the phone, but I was running out of options. I didn’t have any other way of contacting Izuko Gaen, Meme Oshino was still at large, and even her own familiar couldn’t get ahold of Yozuru Kagenui, so I didn’t know what else to do but stay on the line, no matter how much I didn’t want to.

“Hello, Deshuu Kaiki, professional ghostbuster speaking. How may I help you?”


	14. Exorcist

“Of course I’m happy to help,” the notorious conman who didn’t even believe in abberations said to me.

I had told him as few details as possible, because I didn’t want him to know how desperate I was—although I’m sure he could smell it even over the phone—and more to the point, I didn’t trust him.

He’s the kind of man who could swindle a god out of her divinity just as easily as a child out of her donut money.

All I had told him was that I had encountered a mirror at an art exhibit, explained the basic artistic message of the exhibit as best as I could, and that afterwards, I had encountered a mirror image of me that was trying to take my place in my life, was a vastly powerful vampire, and specifically seemed be the embodiment of every rumour about me.

I was skeptical he would be able to help, to tell the truth, but it was possible he had at least encountered a story about such a thing before.

It was possible he could accidentally be helpful.

Despite not believing in abberations.

“Your information is out of date, young man. I’m a true believer in the supernatural. I’ve changed, you know.”

“Really.”

“It’s the truth. I used to think all this abberation stuff was a bunch of exaggerated nonsense, but then there was that business with Miss Nadeko Sengoku, and… do you know what happened right as I was about to leave town, as promised? One of my former marks—a middle schooler—hit me in the head with an iron pipe! Maybe all you weird supernatural kids can laugh off something like that, but a normal person like me can’t survive direct head trauma. I died, man. A middle schooler fuckin’ killed me.”

“You sound pretty lively for a dead man.”

“That’s the thing. I literally died, went to Hell, and came back to life. If a certain someone hadn’t given me their pocket change out of compassion, I would still be there. I’m sure the story of that was written about in some other volume.”

He was going to have to do better than an unused plot hook in a book with an unreliable narrator if he wanted to convince me.

“So I’m supposed to trust you because you say you died and came back to life, and it’s all in some mysterious redemption arc that I’ve never heard of.”

“It’s true. Nobody comes back to life still willing to lead the lifestyle that killed them. I learned there’s definitely some scary shit out there in the supernatural world.”

“Don’t lie to me, Kaiki.”

“I don’t do that anymore. It’s so inconvenient, really. Can I tell you something if you promise not to share it with anyone else? I used to like to tell people that I got good at lying to people because I’m a conman, but the truth is, I became a conman just because I habitually lied to people.”

That part I believed, at least.

It lined up with everything I knew of him.

“Okay, you’ve told me the truth to butter me up, now tell me the part that’s a lie.”

“That’s good, kid. I always thought you should be a little more skeptical. I’m glad to hear it’s taking. Well, it’s up to you if you believe this part or not, and it doesn’t really matter to me, but: lying only works if you’re in the business of running cons. If you’re running an honest business, then you have to actually help out your customers, or you won’t get any repeat business. I’m not gonna say that I’m a reformed man because I don’t like seeing the looks on the faces of dumb kids when they realize they lost their allowance money on some pathetic dream; you’re totally right to mistrust me. I’ll always be that sort of person.”

_But the only thing I like more than seeing that kind of face is money, and right now I need a lot of it, so I need a lot of repeat customers who can write good testimonials for me._

Well, I believed that part too.

“Besides,” he said. “You’re the one who called me. While we’ve been having this fun heart-to-heart, I dug through my library and managed to find a book that has exactly the kind of abberation we’re talking about. Do you wanna know what it says or not?”

“Why shouldn’t I just go find this book myself?”

“Be my guest. Actually, if you want to come visit my condo in Tokyo, I’ll even show it to you myself. You should drop by sometime. I managed to put together a pretty extensive library to help me with my exorcist cons over the years, but it turns out there’s actually some pretty good stuff for my current job as a real ghostbuster, too.”

“I’ll pass. I bet if I went all the way there, when I arrived, you’d try to charge me an entrance fee.”

“Hey, kid, for someone who’s being confronted by the living embodiment of slanderous accusations, you’d think you’d be a little more sympathetic about throwing them around. I’m not gonna say I don’t deserve it, but it doesn’t suit you to be so unsympathetic. Anyway, do you want me to tell you what _The History of the Mirror,_ Chapter 5, Supernatural Beliefs and Superstitions paragraph 10 says about the thing you’re dealing with, or not? If not, feel free to go find the book yourself. I’ll even read off the ISBN number for you if you want. It might take a few days to ship to your little podunk, though.”

I think I understood the con he was playing here.

He was going to read off a single paragraph from a book about the subject, and then he was going to claim that I owed him some fee for the trouble, but he’d reduce it just for me because he wanted a good testimonial for his new service.

I could live with that.

If that was the cost of solving this problem, I’d let him get one on me.

Dealing with Kaiki had hidden costs, but if I accounted for the hidden costs, I could handle it.

“Fine. What does it say?”

“Are you sure? Maybe if you overnight expressed it from Kyoto it could actually arrive pretty quickly—”

“I said fine. What does the book say?”

“Well, basically, if you want to kill him, none of your vampire hunting techniques will actually work. Even if you got some vampire hunters together, which I don’t recommend, they wouldn’t be able to make it stick, he’d just come back the next day. You have to destroy him at the source. If you manage to destroy the source, he’ll disappear, too. In this case, the source is rumours.”

“Hang on, are you telling me I have to get rid of the rumours about me? How am I supposed to do that? If your advice to me is to tell me to apologize for a me that exists in someone else’s head, I reject it entirely.”

“No, no, kid. It’s nothing like that. Those middle schoolers always knew the rumours about you, and this guy didn’t manifest until you saw the mirror. It’s the physical object you need to deal with.”

I could have sworn I’d never told him about the Occult Research Club.

No, I must have.

Or maybe it was just a good guess. I’d heard of cold reading before, and I’m sure that was something he was skilled in.

“Does this oh-so-useful book also tell me how to do that, then?”

“No. That’s why you need my expertise, kid. The ritual involved here is real simple, though. Absolutely braindead simple, even you could pull it off. First you need to go shopping for a few things, then wait until the sun sets. I’ll give you the list right now, so call me back when it gets dark.”

When he said it was braindead simple, I couldn’t help but be a little insulted, but also relieved.

If it was simple, then there was less chance of him screwing it up with his knowledge that largely came from running cons rather than actual genuine experience with the supernatural.

I still wasn’t going to give him a good testimonial, though.

I did my shopping quickly, and then set everything out on the floor while I waited for the sun to set.

He had told me, and I swear I could hear the smirk all the way from the other side of the phone line:

“Okay, kid. So in order to perform this exorcism, what you’re going to need is a brand new baseball bat, a ski mask that completely covers your face, and twenty 1000 yen iTunes gift cards.”


	15. The mirror, again

As instructed, I called him back once the sun had set.

“So the first thing you’re going to need to do is take each of those gift cards off the backing, and read off the number to me.”

Oh, come the fuck on.

“What? I told you that I don’t work for free,” he said. “Unless you know some better way to send me the money all the way over here, but I’ll warn you, my rates get higher if I have to deal with the traditional banking system. I told you I’m trying to run an honest business because I need to make money.”

“This had better work, Kaiki.”

“Let me give you a quick economics lesson. Do you know how much a good testimonial is worth? To tell you the truth, you’re already getting a vastly subsidized rate. Normally I’d be charging you a hundred thousand yen for this, but I’m cutting it down to just twenty thousand because I want you to provide good word of mouth for me. You get nearly eighty thousand yen off the price of my services, I get a free good testimonial from you for half the price of the internet ad spend I’d need to do to fix the SEO for my name, it’s win-win for both of us.”

And there it was.

It was exactly what I thought he’d say.

I could live with that.

“Okay, okay, just stop talking. The first one is…”

And so forth.

After we had arranged the payment, I took the other two items, and slipped out into the night.

Multiple times, I had to tell Shinobu to be quiet, because it seemed like she had gotten really excited about what we were about to do, and I didn’t want to have to explain her to Kaiki who was still on the line.

When I arrived near the gallery, I put on my ski mask.

“Thou didn’t acquire ritual garments for me as well?”

“Shush. You’re fine.”

“What?” Kaiki asked.

“Nothing.”

A couple minutes and at least one crime later, I found myself inside the exhibit.

It was completely empty, and completely dark, save for some moonlight coming in the now-broken window.

I stood in front of the mirror that still didn’t reflect me, although it did show the ski mask so it didn’t seem as weird, and also the powered down computer screen.

“Wait, Kaiki. I’m having second thoughts here.”

“If you want me to pay for an expensive plane ticket and come all the way down there just to swing a baseball bat in the darkness a few times, I’m happy to do it, but it’ll cost you a lot more. And I warn you, I only fly first class. Are you sure you can afford to be that squeamish about a minor property crime, kid?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just… is breaking a mirror really a good idea? Is it really worth getting rid of him if I have to deal with seven years of bad luck?”

He laughed.

“No, Araragi. You got it all wrong.

“You have to smash the _computer._ You don’t have any superstitions about that, do you? Just swing away, and imagine you’re hitting the other you.”

Well.

In that case.

I swung away as if it was his stupid smug grin I was hitting.


	16. Epilogue

The epilogue, or maybe, the punchline of this story.

After the ritual was complete, I called up Hitagi, and since she didn’t ask who had helped me exorcise my doppelganger, I didn’t offer it up either.

In any event, while I was disposing of the evidence of the tools of my crime, she checked in on her apartment, and there was a pair of empty handcuffs still attached to her refridgerator and a pile of broken glass that seemed to weigh as much as an entire human body.

Just in case we’d somehow incurred some bad luck from the broken mirror shards of the now-exorcised doppelganger, we both cast some salt over our shoulders just to be sure, but it seemed like we were completely in the clear.

I still didn’t have a reflection, and never would, but my encounter with the mirror was concluded, at least.

A few days later, I was eating breakfast at home. A text message had just come in, and I was about to check what it said, when I was interrupted by my mom arriving home with a strange woman.

“Koyomi… you’re not in any trouble or anything. Your father and I have been thinking about what you asked for the other day, and we think you’re right, you do deserve it. But it would be really helpful if you could answer a few of this woman’s questions for me?”

“Uh, sure.”

It’s not that I didn’t trust my mother to look out for me.

She was my mother, after all.

It’s just that when a police officer asks you to “answer a few questions,” even if she is your mother and you would trust her with your life, it’s enough to make even an innocent man nervous.

Let alone a guilty man.

The strange woman sat across from me.

“Hi, Mr. Araragi. My name is Asuka Ito, and I’m an insurance investigator. Your mother’s told me a lot about you, it’s nice to meet you.”

“Sure. I guess you already know my name. It’s nice to meet you too.”

“There was some vandalism at an art gallery a few nights ago. I’m just an investigator for the insurance company, so I don’t actually really care about who was the vandal responsible… my job is just to figure out if the company should pay out on the policy. That’s all. The police tell me things that they know, but I don’t care about things like criminal matters. All I care about is telling my company ‘yes, this is fraud,’ or ‘no, you have to pay it.’ Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“We know there was a vandal wearing a mask, but we don’t care about his identity at all.”

“Right, okay, got it.”

I could read between the lines.

The mask hadn’t been enough, but I was getting away with property crimes anyway.

…somehow, I got the impression that this might not have been true if my mother wasn’t standing there.

“I’m just here asking because you and three other girls were the only people to visit the exhibit, so the whole thing seems a little bit fishy to me.”

Really? Just us four?

Thinking about it, it wasn’t actually very surprising.

Since the exhibit was, in fact, pretty stupid.

She continued:

“I mean, it’s true we insure some pretty unpopular art from unknown artists, but they’re usually not that expensive.”

“There was a computer that was part of it,” I tried to help.

“Yes, that’s part of the claim. So the policy is made out to a person named Yuki Suzuki. Do you know anything about him? Have you seen him around, perhaps? If you even have a hunch that you can’t explain that he might have some connection to the vandal, that’s good enough for me.”

“Sorry. I don’t think I know anyone called that.”

“How about Deshuu Kaiki? We think that might be his real name.”

Ah.

So that’s how it was.

“Just so I understand, um, you think this Mr. Kaiki or Suzuki or whatever had something to do with the vandalism?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. If he did, that’s insurance fraud, which is a crime I _will_ hand over to the police, and needless to say he won’t be allowed to collect on the policy. Sometimes these criminals think they’re really smart, they put out an insurance policy for vandalism, then just break the thing themselves, not realizing that we look pretty hard into this sort of thing.”

“Wow. This all sounds really complicated.”

I spun my wheels.

I wasted time, trying to think it through.

Actually, to use a phrase that man said earlier, it sounded braindead simple.

It was so simple, even I could understand it.

Suddenly, several weird things that didn’t make a lot of sense seemed to line up perfectly.

I hadn’t just been conned.

I’d been part of his con against someone else. Probably a far more valuable one, if it involved insurance policies.

“Well, you don’t have to worry about the complicated details, leave that up to me. Have you heard of Deshuu Kaiki, or not?”

I had to think about it.

The opportunity to ruin Kaiki’s life, or at least this one particular scam, had just been placed in my lap.

And I wasn’t going to pretend that I was so magnanimous that I didn’t want to see him suffer for all the things he’d put the people in my life through. Even if the story about him going to Hell had been canon, that would only be fitting for all the ill deeds I knew and didn’t know about.

However.

I could ruin Kaiki’s scam, but that wouldn’t get me anything.

And his help had in fact resolved my problem, even if now I was starting to wonder if he wasn’t the cause of it too, if he was in cahoots with the original artist.

No, it was my own words that had been the cause of it.

I couldn’t blame him for that.

Maybe if this whole thing had been his plan, he had expected I might do something, but it was still something I had done on my own.

In any event, he had helped resolve my problem, and it didn’t seem smart to close the door on people who could help solve other problems in the future.

“Sorry, I don’t think I’ve heard that name. It doesn’t really ring a bell.”

“Are you sure? Think hard about it. Maybe there’s another alias…?”

At this point, my mother stepped in, saying in a scary authoritative voice:

“He said he doesn’t know him. That should be enough for you. Do you have any other questions?”

The words seemed to chill Ms. Ito and her line of inquiry entirely.

Was my extremely boring ordinary mother really that scary a person to her?!

“…no, that’s all. Thank you very much for your time, both of you.”

My mother saw her to the door, and after a few more words exchanged between the two, the investigator was gone.

“You know, if you’re ever in trouble, you can tell me, right?” my mother said.

“Thanks, mom. …I think I’m okay now, though.”

“Good,” she said, and left the room. The part where she said “I don’t want to make a habit of this” was left implied.

As was the part where I didn’t want to make a habit of it, either. Good riddance to that shitty mirror.

Finally, at long last, I was alone again, and free to check my phone. It was a message from Hitagi, saying: “Doing some shopping. Can you tell me what your waist and hip measurements are?”

I had an idea of what she might need that for, but decided not to ask.

If I asked, she would probably tell me the answer, and then I’d have to protest. But I could hardly protest if I didn’t know for sure, could I?

My gift to her would be that I’d save my protests for when she could see them in person.

I didn’t know off the top of my head, of course, since men’s clothing asked for different measurements.

I went to Tsukihi’s room and knocked on her door.

“Hey, sis, can I borrow your tape measure?”

“Karen’s got it! Ask her! And go away!” she yelled back, without even opening the door.

It seemed like I had a ways to go before I could mend the rift with my little sister that the doppelganger had created, although I was sure it would pass in time. All I had to do was be normal from here on out with her.

Easy.

I’m great at being normal.

As for the Kaiki situation…

Well, I bet I could have gotten a refund from him, unless he’s already spent all those gift cards. But I wondered, what would the doppelganger have done? He seemed more like the sort of person who could handle someone like Kaiki. Maybe it was better if he thought he was dealing with that sort of person.

I bet the doppelganger would have wanted Kaiki to owe him a favour. I bet he would want Kaiki to know that he could have gotten him busted for insurance fraud, but didn’t, and now he owes him one.

He’d probably do it with that stupid smug grin, too. I’m not too embarrassed to admit that I’m still thinking about it even still.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, since I can’t exactly practice that technique in the mirror, I’m going to go look for Karen.


End file.
